(New Directions in Irish and Irish American Literature) Claire A. Culleton, Ellen Scheible (Eds.) - Rethinking Joyce's Dubliners (2017, Palgrave Macmillan)

NEW DIRECTIONS IN IRISH AND IRISH AMERICAN LITERATURE
RETHINKING JOYCE’S
DUBLINERS
Edited by
Claire A. Culleton and
Ellen Scheible
New Directions in Irish and Irish American
Literature
Series Editor
Claire A. Culleton
Kent State University
Kent, Ohio, USA
Aim of the Series
New Directions in Irish and Irish American Literature promotes fresh
scholarship that explores models of Irish and Irish American identity and
examines issues that address and shape the contours of Irishness and works
that investigate the fluid, shifting, and sometimes multivalent discipline of
Irish Studies. Politics, the academy, gender, and Irish and Irish American
culture, among other things, have not only inspired but affected recent
scholarship centered on Irish and Irish American literature. The series’s
focus on Irish and Irish American literature and culture contributes to our
twenty-first century understanding of Ireland, America, Irish Americans,
and the creative, intellectual, and theoretical spaces between.
More information about this series at

http://www.springer.com/series/14747
Claire A. Culleton • Ellen Scheible
Editors
Rethinking Joyce’s
Dubliners
Editors
Claire A. Culleton Ellen Scheible
Department of English Department of English/Irish Studies
Kent State University Bridgewater State University
Kent, Ohio, USA Bridgewater, Massachusetts, USA
New Directions in Irish and Irish American Literature

ISBN 978-3-319-39335-3 ISBN 978-3-319-39336-0 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-39336-0
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Acknowledgments
Claire Culleton and Ellen Scheible wish to thank Ryan Jenkins and Allie
Bochicchio at Palgrave Macmillan for their helpfulness in steering this pro
ject through its various channels.
Ellen Scheible adds: This project would not have been possible with-
out the friendships and relationships that developed during the last fif-
teen years of my time at North American James Joyce Conferences and
International James Joyce Symposia. Most importantly, I am grateful for
the kindness and support of my co-editor, Claire Culleton, and the three
years of scholarship, friendship, and laughter that we have shared. We
would not have begun this project without the 2013 reincarnation of the
Miami J’yce Conference and the conversations and discussions that grew
from that experience. Even though I was never his graduate student or
official mentee, Vince Cheng encouraged and motivated me to expand my
ideas about Joyce and Ireland, while also making me feel like I was part of
a community. I continue to be impressed by the generosity and support
that he shows toward junior scholars. I am also in debt to a long list of
Joyceans who have given me advice, both personally and professionally,
over the years, including Colleen Jaurretche and Paul Saint-Amour, both
of whom persuaded me to study Joyce when I was a graduate student at
Claremont. Marc Redfield, Constance Jordan, David Lloyd, and Wendy
Martin taught me how to be an academic. My students, particularly those
from my senior seminar, Domestic Demons: Twentieth-Century Irish
Literature and the Domestic Interior, have influenced my thinking about
Joyce more than they could ever imagine. My colleagues at Bridgewater
State University, especially those who supported my development of the
v
vi Acknowledgments
Irish Studies Program, helped me find a space where I truly can teach my
research. My parents, Bruce and Sally Scheible, will always be the reason
I succeed in anything. Bill Selove has read everything I have written in the
past two years, and he loves me anyway—for that, I am grateful. Finally,
I received a Marion and Jasper Whiting Foundation grant to do research
on Joyce in Ireland during summer 2014, and much of that work impacted
my essay in this collection.
Claire Culleton wishes to thank all of her friends, especially the painting
group Sundays@One, for their support and good cheer. She also is grate-
ful to Kent State University’s Research Council, Kent State University’s
Division of Research and Graduate Studies, and the Provost’s office for
a research award, travel support, and a sabbatical during which she was
able to focus on this collection. She adds: I also appreciate my department
chair, Robert Trogdon, who has been equally supportive and generous.
Students in my Editing and Publishing I and II classes (spring and fall 2016)
apprenticed on this live project, some for more than a year, and I am
grateful to them for their help and good humor, especially Taylor Durbin,
Courtney Middleton, Brianna Molitor, and Elizabeth Szabat, as well
as Lauren Cosentino, Briana Kawecki, Nicole Lewis, Audrey Lockhart,
Rebecca Major, Molly McGirr, Chelsea Panin, Megan Sapsford, Minette
Tomasch, and Sierra Willoughby. It has been a blast working on this proj-
ect with my co-editor, Ellen Scheible. May there be many more books and
collaborations in our future. Finally, we’d both like to acknowledge the
strong work by contributing scholars to this collection. It was a pleasure
working with each of them.
Contents
1 Introduction. Rethinking Dubliners:

A Case for What Happens in Joyce’s Stories 1
Claire A. Culleton and Ellen Scheible
2 “The Thin End of the Wedge”:

How Things Start in Dubliners 9
Claire A. Culleton
3 “No There There”: Place, Absence, and Negativity

in “A Painful Case” 33
Margot Norris
4 A “Sensation of Freedom” and the Rejection

of Possibility in Dubliners 51
Jim LeBlanc
5 “Scudding in Towards Dublin”: Joyce Studies

and the Online Mapping Dubliners Project 69
Jasmine Mulliken
6 Joyce’s Mirror Stages and “The Dead” 95

Ellen Scheible
vii
viii Contents
7 Joyce’s Blinders: An Urban Ecocritical Study

of Dubliners and More 115
Joseph P. Kelly
8 Clashing Cultures in “Counterparts”: Navigating

among Print, Printing, and Oral Narratives in
Turn-of-the-Century Dublin 145
Miriam O’Kane Mara
9 Intermental Epiphanies: Rethinking Dubliners

with Cognitive Psychology 161
Martin Brick
10 From “Spiritual Paralysis” to “Spiritual Liberation”:

Joyce’s Samaritan “Grace” 175
Jack Dudley
11 Men in Slow Motion: Male Gesture in “Two Gallants” 195

Enda Duffy
Index 215
List of Figures
Fig. 5.1 Screenshot of the Mapping Dubliners Project homepage 72

Fig. 5.2 Screenshot of the Google map version, showing the
list pane on the left and the map pane on the right.
Map data from GeoBasis, Google 73
Fig. 5.3 Screenshot of pop-up containing the place name,
the story in which the reference appears, a brief description
of context, and the passage from the text where the place is
referenced. Map data from Google 74
Fig. 5.4 Illustration of a gnomon 79
Fig. 5.5 An approximation of the “Encounter” route. The solid line
is the route the boys take, and the dotted line is the implied
route home via train 80
Fig. 5.6 A geographic gnomon represented by North Richmond
Street in the northwest, the exotic east in the southeast,
and Araby (the bazaar) in between 81
Fig. 5.7 Approximate map of the gnomon section of Lenehan’s route 82
Fig. 5.8 Approximate map of the middle section
of Maria’s route in “Clay” 86
ix
CHAPTER 1
Introduction
Rethinking Dubliners:
A Case for What Happens in Joyce’s Stories
Claire A. Culleton and Ellen Scheible
Almost twenty years ago, Fritz Senn asked us to reconsider the gnomon
as a foundational critical tool for Joyce studies. His 1998 essay, “Gnomon
Inverted,” appeared as the only piece in the “New Directions” final sec-
tion of the critical collection ReJoycing: New Readings of “Dubliners,”
positioning his argument both on the threshold of new approaches to
Joyce’s stories and on the outer fringes of traditional Joyce criticism. Senn
asks us to pay attention to how “the renewed perpetuation of incomplete-
ness” in the canon of writing on Dubliners “though far from futile, has
become a little worn and shows signs of diminishing perceptive invigora-
tion.”1 Seemingly hopeful that he can reinvigorate debates concerning
Joyce’s collection, Senn offers this explanation of his essay: “Gnomon
need not automatically or mechanically spell deprivation. This note then
C. A. Culleton (*)
Department of English, Kent State University, Kent, OH, USA
e-mail: cculleto@kent.edu
E. Scheible (*)
Department of English/Irish Studies, Bridgewater State University,
Bridgewater, MA, USA
e-mail: escheible@bridgew.edu
© The Author(s) 2017 1

C. A. Culleton, E. Scheible (eds.), Rethinking Joyce’s “Dubliners,”
New Directions in Irish and Irish American Literature,
DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-39336-0_1
2 C. A. CULLETON AND E. SCHEIBLE
is nothing more than a descriptive possibility to see Dubliners on occasion

as complexity brought about by unforeseen augmentations that can be
disruptive and unsettling.” Those “augmentations” or supplementations,
as Senn’s essay later suggests, lead him to point out that besides its focus
on tropes like paralysis and gnomon, “Dubliners is also a series of gra-
tuities” or a text that sometimes gives us a “gnomonic bonus,” a text
where things happen, causing “changes that were not part of any original
expectation.”2 In Rethinking “Dubliners,” we take up the challenge that
Fritz Senn gave us at the end of the twentieth century, hoping to put
“descriptive possibility” not just on the critical periphery of writing about
Dubliners but also at the front and center, as a necessary movement for-
ward in scholarly approaches to Joyce’s famous stories.
James Joyce published Dubliners more than a century ago. Since then,
readers, scholars, and academics have vigorously discussed and interpreted
the stories and the collection from perspectives that have become by 2016, it
seems to us, in need of reorientation. Readers have come not only to accept
these readings but also to internalize them, understanding them as a kind
of gospel truth. In Fritz Senn’s terms, they “automatically or mechanically”
produce a formula for twentieth-century approaches to reading short stories.3
Teaching new readers how to think about the world of modern literature
through the Joycean lenses of irony, parallax, chiasmus, gnomon, and other
stylistic and discursive frameworks exemplified by Joyce’s writing has great
pedagogical value. In fact, it has produced an archive of companion literature
that most modernist faculty employ with excitement and vigor (including the
editors of this collection). However, in the centenary year of the 1916 Easter
Rising in Ireland and just over one hundred years after Joyce gave us our
beloved short stories, we urge readers of Dubliners to reconsider the tradi-
tional tropes of paralysis and stagnation in favor of movement and change.
The readings and arguments that we have come to know and love deeply,
as critics and readers of Joyce, have become so conventional that they risk
turning into stock readings. For example, most essays on any given story in
Dubliners will refer to the paralysis of its main character, or of its narrative,
or to the congestion of the city of Dublin itself, and use the metaphor of
paralysis as a starting point or platform from which to launch a new reading;
but can the reading be new if it reinforces such an established point? What
if readers were to focus not only on paralysis but also on movement and
mobility in each of the fifteen stories? Imagine the new readings that such
an approach might yield. In fact, before you go further into the introduc-
tion, you may want to read the second chapter of Rethinking “Dubliners”
and see how Claire Culleton navigates such a rereading.
INTRODUCTION 3
Culleton has previously written on Dubliners and returns to the text

again to rethink the way movement might emerge as a contemporary lens
of study. Margot Norris shows how, in “A Painful Case,” social conven-
tion keeps Mr. Duffy from creating the space he needs in the limited world
of the story, but she then also argues that Duffy is a mobile character—
moving through and around the geography of suburban Dublin. Jim
LeBlanc underscores the dialectic between paralysis and liberation in
Dubliners and points out that freedom and movement exist in the sto-
ries but are often stifled by the characters’ internal failure to accept the
responsibility of that freedom. Likewise, Enda Duffy invites us to consider
gesture as a counter-style to paralysis, where gesturing signifies inevitable
change and, specifically in “Two Gallants,” produces versions of masculin-
ity and Irishness that will emerge later in the century in Ireland.
Duffy’s approach brings to mind Anthony Burgess’s early canonical
essay, “A Paralysed City,” where Burgess clearly endorses the tendency of
his contemporaries to read Dubliners as an illustration of paralysis while
also underscoring the energy of the text: “this rather mean city is spread
before us, its timidity and the hollowness of its gestures recorded with
economy and a kind of muffled poetry, its bouncing cheques of the spirit
endorsed with humour but with neither compassion nor censoriousness.”4
Even as early as the 1960s, critics understood Joyce’s project as not just
one concerned with paralysis and gnomon, but one of gesture and spirit,
where, as Burgess emphasizes, “Dublin may be an impotent city, but
Ireland is more than Dublin. Life may seem to lie in exile, ‘out in Europe’,
but it is really waiting coiled up in Ireland, ready to lunge.” As we know,
the Ireland that is waiting to lunge eventually becomes an Ireland on the
brink of revolution.
The Irish Question: One Approach

At this point, readers might ask what is at stake in flipping the traditional
approach to Dubliners and reading the text as preoccupied with momen-
tum and progress rather than overt stagnation. While many arguments
come to mind and are presented in this critical collection, one stands
out to us: Joyce’s ambivalent view of early twentieth-century Irish his-
tory is both diagnosis and prognosis, temporary paralysis on the brink of
conscious awakening. You will see that some of the essays in this collec-
tion engage this topic directly, quoting from letters and archival materials
that support Joyce’s competing claims that the Easter Rising would be a
useless moment in history and, yet, that he saw Dubliners as a necessary

mandate for progress and change in Ireland. One approach taken is to
weigh Irish history alongside traditional Joycean tropes and ask how those
defining, early years of nation building in Ireland may have impacted the
tense moments in Joyce’s stories, where movement forward, sometimes
as explosive as a bottle of beer about to pop open in “Ivy Day in the
Committee Room,” was inevitable.
Such approaches read Joyce’s work as situated in a specific time and
place: pre-1916 Ireland. Joyce was not alone in his unwillingness to fully
support the Easter Rising. In fact, most of Dublin agreed with him. As
R. F. Foster has noted, “1916 was made by a minority of a minority, and
many of those involved were pitchforked into action with no notice what-
soever.”5 While the cultural critique in Dubliners certainly maintains the
sharpness of a pitchfork at times, Joyce’s skepticism of the Revival puts
him at odds with many Irish writers who were openly propagating nation-
alist sentiments. However, it would be difficult to divorce Joyce’s writing
from the time period that produced it. Andrew Gibson claims that Joyce
“responded intensely” to the “mutation in cultural temper” in Ireland at
the beginning of the twentieth century—a change marked by an unattain-
able quest for Home Rule.6 Gibson describes this change in temper as a
“widespread and increasingly subdued awareness of unavoidable compli-
cation, and an ensuing and equally widespread sense of stagnation.” He
claims that Joyce’s response to it was a lifelong inability to forget “the
awareness of complication, the difficulty of any notion of a decisive his-
torical leap forward, and the sense of irony that consciousness of the two
of them tends to generate.” Joyce shared with Ireland the same agitation:
an irresolvable tension between an unavoidable confrontation with his-
tory and an internalized inertia. Many critics of Irish modernism, Gibson
included, agree that Ireland’s literary genius, driven by both disillusion
and a desire for change, emerges most aggressively during the period that
ultimately led to Irish independence, with James Joyce at the helm.
Specific moments in Irish history are important to this reading of Joyce.
Before the Famine in the middle of the nineteenth century, Ireland was a
British colony on the edge of a progressive, modern economy that would
bring great prosperity for Anglo-Irish landowners and British absentee
landlords. After the Famine, Ireland was left destitute. With almost half the
population lost through either starvation or emigration, the small colony
lost any claim to the modernity that seemed inevitable at the beginning of
the nineteenth century. Consequently, Irish Catholicism and nationalism
INTRODUCTION 5
developed as powerful cultural institutions and both sought to rebuild the

nation through the commodification of tradition rather than the forces of
European modernity that Joyce valued so deeply. In James Joyce and the
Question of History, James Fairhall argues, “the theme of paralysis may
be traced both to Joyce’s ambivalent nationalism and to his strong sense
of identity as an Irish Catholic.”7 However, this new, fetishized, Catholic
nationalism produced its own modernizing momentum, and the Irish
nation that surfaces in 1922 is not only one half of a partitioned island, but
also a culture contingent on the conflicted binary of modernist aesthetics
and Irish national tradition.
One way of reconsidering Joyce’s project is to understand such ten-
sions as laying the groundwork for rereading the stories in Dubliners as
barometers of movement and change. Regardless of his chosen exile, we
know from letters that Joyce stayed abreast of all political developments
in Dublin. While the stories were published two years before the Easter
Rising, we might see their evocation of a culture poised on the brink of
explosion as a clear precursor to the irrevocable changes marking 1916
Dublin. On the other hand, we would not want to commit the egregious
mistake that Fairhall warns us against: “It isn’t enough to rebut Joyce’s
picture of a paralyzed city simply by citing, as if the facts spoke for them-
selves, the 1916 Rising.”8 Instead, the Rising becomes one symptom of
the diagnosis Joyce gives us: an Irish subjectivity that must redefine self-
hood and nationhood on its own terms, understanding the intricate ten-
sions, both paralytic and revolutionary, that underscore the formation of
a Free State.
Joyce might be the most famous Irish novelist of the early twentieth
century, but he is not the most famous Irish writer of that time. William
Butler Yeats is still better known throughout the world as the paradigm
of Irish literature and thought during the foundational years of Ireland’s
national development. Both Joyce and Yeats understood early twentieth-
century Irishness to be a divided experience, but Yeats envisioned a one-
day unified culture, albeit hierarchically stratified, based on an invented
history, while Joyce emphasized difference and cultural diversity, although
also based on elements of the past, both imagined and constructed. This is
to say that two of the most respected literary minds of the early twentieth
century approached a shared problem—how do we build an Irish nation—
from different directions. But, they shared the same belief that art was the
true medium for social change. Now, just over one hundred years after the
1914 publication of Joyce’s Dubliners, and one hundred years after the
1916 Easter Rising that Yeats so dramatically memorializes in his famous

poem, “Easter 1916,” we are able to see how Irish modernist writers rep-
resented the development of the Irish nation in their writing and sought
to envision a new, mobilized Ireland.
We hope that this collection underscores the subtle but present politi-
cal and artistic momentum of change that Joyce illustrates in his writ-
ing. We wonder if paralysis in Dubliners marks the quiet before the storm
of twentieth-century national violence in Ireland. If Joyce was not only
writing about paralysis but also questioning the movements that trans-
form colonies into nations, he had his finger on the pulse of a very real
twentieth-century conundrum. To be a nation is often to enter into a
global community that resists cultural difference and change in the name
of economic prosperity. Perhaps one of our new challenges is to redefine
the concept of nation as a moving and constantly changing space—one
that is neither paralyzed nor homogenous; one that, like Gabriel Conroy
at the end of “The Dead,” recognizes that “the time had come” to begin
a new journey of self-definition.9
Notes
1. Fritz Senn, “Gnomon Inverted,” in ReJoycing: New Readings of “Dubliners,”
ed. Rosa M. Bollettieri Bosinelli and Harold F. Mosher Jr. (Lexington: The
University Press of Kentucky, 1998), 250.
2. Ibid., 252, 254.
3. Ibid., 250.
4. Anthony Burgess, “A Paralysed City,” in James Joyce: “Dubliners” and “A
Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man”: A Casebook, ed. Morris Beja (London:
Macmillan, 1973), 234.
5. R. F. Foster, Modern Ireland, 1600–1972 (London: Penguin, 1988), 477.
6. Andrew Gibson, The Strong Spirit: History, Politics, and Aesthetics in the
Writings of James Joyce, 1898–1915 (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2013), 34.
7. James Fairhall, James Joyce and the Question of History (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1993), 70.
8. Fairhall, Question of History, 71.
9. James Joyce, Dubliners, in Norton Critical Edition, ed. Margot Norris (New
York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2006), 194.
INTRODUCTION 7
Bibliography
Burgess, Anthony. “A Paralysed City.” In James Joyce: “Dubliners” and “A Portrait
of the Artist as a Young Man”: A Casebook, edited by Morris Beja, 224–240.
London: Macmillan, 1973.
Fairhall, James. James Joyce and the Question of History. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1993.
Foster, R. F. Modern Ireland, 1600 –1972. London: Penguin, 1988.
Gibson, Andrew. The Strong Spirit: History, Politics, and Aesthetics in the Writings
of James Joyce, 1898 –1915. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013.
Joyce, James. Dubliners. Norton Critical Edition. Edited by Margot Norris. New
York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2006.
Senn, Fritz. “Gnomon Inverted.” In ReJoycing: New Readings of “Dubliners,”
edited by Rosa M. Bollettieri Bosinelli and Harold F. Mosher Jr., 240–257.
Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 1998.
CHAPTER 2
“The Thin End of the Wedge”: How Things

Start in Dubliners
Claire A. Culleton
This chapter stems from my larger concern with teaching Joyce’s Dubliners.
I began to focus my work on Dubliners last year, when the book turned
one hundred years old, and I had committed to giving a paper at a confer-
ence in the Netherlands about rethinking Dubliners at one hundred. What
the other panelists and I tried to focus on were new and exciting readings
of Dubliners, readings that could change conversations about the book. So
I focused my attention on the metaphors of paralysis that scholars invari-
ably invoke when referring to the characters and events in Joyce’s book,
because I thought that the metaphor of paralysis was at best no longer
useful and, at its worst, was making the criticism on Dubliners susceptible
to the same paralytic malady.
I began by focusing on an expression that captured my imagination in
Dubliners, “the thin end of the wedge.” This, one of my favorite expres-
sions in Dubliners, comes in “Ivy Day in the Committee Room,” when
Old Jack implies to Mr. Henchy, after Henchy offers the young delivery
boy a bottle of stout for his troubles, that this is how it all starts: “That’s
the way it begins,” Jack says, to which Henchy adds, “The thin end of the
wedge,” both men suggesting that this is the beginning of the young boy’s
C. A. Culleton (*)
Department of English, Kent State University, Kent, OH, USA
e-mail: cculleto@kent.edu

DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-39336-0_2
10 C. A. CULLETON
predictable alcoholism.1 It is a relatively obscure expression in the United

States, one derived from logging and forestry practices—the thick end of
a wedge is hammered continuously and the thin end steadily widens the
opening until the log falls apart, splits. Terence Brown explains the impli-
cation of this proverbial phrase in his 1992 Penguin edition of Dubliners,
saying that once the first step is taken, “there is no going back.”2 Eric
Partridge, the godfather of hunting down clichés, word origins, and the
meanings of underworld or slang phrases, says of “the thin end of the
wedge” that it means “the beginning of an influence, the creation of a
precedent,”3 the establishment of a pattern. When I started to consider the
thin end of the wedge and its implication that “That’s the way it begins,”
and that there is “no going back,” I wondered, “Is there no going back in
Dubliners?” If the expression also points to the beginning of an influence
and the establishment of a pattern, let me look, I said, to see what’s begin-
ning, who’s being influenced, and what precedents and patterns are being
created. In other words, how do things start in Dubliners?
We know the book starts with the sentence, “There was no hope
for him this time: it was the third stroke,”4 and we know that due to
his general paresis, the priest had suffered “the inexorable inroads of
disintegration,” as Jack Morgan puts it in Joyce’s City, suggesting that
Flynn was “a human subject becoming unmade”5 before the boy’s very
eyes. In the early twentieth century, physical paralysis was a real problem
for people living in Joyce’s Dublin, whether, like the priest, they suf-
fered from sexually transmitted diseases, the later stages of which caused
inflammation of the brain and led to dementia and paralysis, or whether
they were afflicted with alcoholism or any of the other many diseases that
affected the body and compromised or severely affected one’s mobility.
Yet nineteenth-century Ireland, too, was plagued by symptomatic para-
lytic conditions brought on by surviving the Famine, conditions such as
muteness, senselessness, and stupefaction. Andrew Gibson in The Strong
Spirit: History, Politics, and Aesthetics in the Writings of James Joyce
1898–1915 suggests that the stories in Dubliners reflect Joyce’s under-
standing of post-Famine pathology and writes that “At some level, Joyce
knew that he was dealing with a culture still stupefied by an episode of
historical psychosis”6 and that his stories expose “the ongoing seismic
tremors of the Famine.”7
The trope of paralysis can also be linked with the “tired air” hardly cir-
culating throughout Dublin, notes Saikat Majumdar in Prose of the World:
Modernism and the Banality of Empire:
“THE THIN END OF THE WEDGE” 11
The musty, long-enclosed air in the houses in the blind street in ‘Araby,’ ‘the
odor of dusty cretonne’ in Eveline’s nostrils, the sentences copied ad infi-
nitum by the clerk Farrington, and the provincial Irish culture so feared by
Gabriel Conroy all breathe the tired air held prisoner by the claustrophobic
and iterative life of colonial Ireland, banished to the margins of modernity
under the rule of Stephen’s ‘two masters’—‘the Imperial British state … and
the holy Roman catholic and apostolic church.’8
So yes, there was real paralysis evident and lingering in Joyce’s Dublin,
and it was especially compounded by the slow, sclerotic responses of
the Dublin Corporation to address dangerous housing situations, drain-
age problems, or street and tenement sanitation. The National Archives
notes that “the death rate in Dublin per thousand was 22.3” according
to the 1911 census, adding that in 1911, “nearly 26,000 families lived
in inner-city tenements and 20,000 of these lived in just one room” that
was “filthy, overcrowded, disease-ridden, and teeming with malnour-
ished children.”9 Joyce’s stories maintain an organic aspect of this sort
of paralysis, and his use of the clinical term paresis indicates the great-
ness of the stagnancy affecting his characters; but equally important,
Joyce also emphasizes a tension between the stagnancy and the move-
ment he saw afoot in Dublin. This is why I argue that insisting only on
treating the paralysis in the stories discourages readers from seeing the
incredible movement that was alive and moving about Dublin as Joyce
wrote these stories.
For example, the young narrator keeps gazing up at the priest’s win-
dow, looking for a sign to indicate whether the priest has died yet. He says,
“Every night as I gazed up at the window I said softly to myself the word
paralysis”;10 but are we to assume that this book is a series of stories about
hopelessness and paralysis simply because these words appear on the first
page? The boy also focuses attention on the word gnomon, a geometrical
figure of a parallelogram or rectangle that has a corner missing. Critical
attention has fetishized this word, too, leading readers to believe that in
every story, a piece is broken off, something is missing, begging our com-
pulsion to figure out what “it” is.
Typical students can get bored very easily reading the stories in Dubliners.
Mine, at least, come to class complaining that “nothing happens” in these
stories. “They’re soooooo boring!” they cry. Let us rethink these stories,
and see if we are willing to consider moving away from interpretations that
focus negative attention on character immovability and incompleteness;
12 C. A. CULLETON
because as we know, these stories are anything but boring, and instead of
“nothing happening” in them, there is frenzied activity going on above
and beneath the surface in each of them. Any reiteration in the classroom,
then, to suggest that the pallor of paralysis hangs over each of these stories
paralyzes the students’ imaginations, and blinds them (and us) to all of the
excitement and vigorous action that is in each of the stories. But the trope
of paralysis is trapped underneath all those sedimented layers of one hun-
dred years’ of critical interpretation.
Another problem, when teaching Joyce, is compounded by the unimag-
inative, stock interpretations of Dubliners that students easily access on
the Internet. Many of them come to class already terrified about reading
Joyce—they have heard so much about how difficult he is, how “sym-
bolic” all of his works are—that they are compelled by that fear to search
out information about the stories in anticipation of class discussions, or
sometimes, to replace having to read the stories themselves. So they go
to websites that supply helpful, but entrenched, interpretations about the
stories that supposedly make reading Dubliners easier to comprehend:
sites like sparknotes.com or cliffnotes.com, and so forth, that normally
focus discussion on the themes of escape, paralysis, hopelessness, and
Joyce’s contempt for Dublin and for the Catholic Church, among other
things. The sites are rarely updated and represent canonical readings at
their worst. For example, simply Googling the terms “paralysis dubliners”
in lower case letters brings back 130,000 results in 0.59 seconds.11 Indeed,
the Internet is littered with information on Dubliners that links the work
to paralysis. Our students come to accept these interpretations as a kind
of gospel truth—they internalize them—and so these age-old readings
become pedestrian, conventional, stock. That is a big problem. Most sites
on any given story in Dubliners will refer to the paralysis of its main char-
acter, or of its narrative, or to the congestion of the city of Dublin itself,
and use the metaphor of paralysis as a starting point or a platform from
which to launch readings. But the reading cannot be new or engaging if
it proceeds from such an established point. I’d like to see these readings
destabilized and dismantled.
The book opens with the narrator of “The Sisters” recalling the influ-
ence Father Flynn had on him as a young boy. “He had taught me a great
deal,” he says.12 He had taught him how to pronounce Latin properly. He
had told him about the catacombs and Napoleon Bonaparte and explained
the different vestments worn by the priests and the meaning of the differ-
ent ceremonies of the Mass. He used to “put [him] through the responses
of the Mass,” which he had made him learn by heart.13 This certainly
establishes the beginning of what would be Flynn’s steady influence on
the boy—his hammering away at the thick end of the wedge—to instruct
and to indoctrinate the young boy toward the priesthood. After all, the
boy’s uncle, Jack, notes that Father Flynn “had a great wish” for the boy.14
Just as Father Flynn instructed the young boy, Joyce instructed his
future readers on ways to interpret Dubliners; and for little more than one
hundred years now, readers have been connecting Joyce’s Dubliners stories
with paralysis, tipped off not only by the book’s opening line about the
priest’s stroke, but also by Joyce’s early, 1904 letter to Constantine Curran
where he wrote of his book, “I call the series Dubliners to betray the soul
of that hemiplegia or paralysis which many consider a city.”15 The word
paralysis also appears on the first page of the opening story, “The Sisters.”
Yet for all the declarations and assertions made by critics and readers about
paralysis in Dubliners, it is really remarkable that at the beginning of each
of the fifteen stories, something is starting, something is beginning, some-
thing is about to happen; and it is this start—the thin end of the wedge
prying through to something and getting hammered and hammered as
each story develops—that “determine[s] the whole aftercourse” of each
character’s life, as Joyce would later write in Ulysses when Stephen Dedalus
is asked to come up with an original story, “something with a bite in it.”16
As Stephen imagines the start of his story, he is distracted by the
dramatic pause that J.J. O’Molloy inserts into his story, the one about
Seymour Bushe’s speech on the law of evidence. Stephen makes note of
the pause, thinking, “Pause. J. J. O’Molloy took out his cigarette case.
False lull. Something quite ordinary.”17 The “false lull” apparently inspires
Stephen to open his story with a similarly ordinary lull: “Messenger took
out his matchbox thoughtfully and lit his cigar.”18 Stephen’s story starts
badly, yet it determines everything that follows.19 Colm Tóibín also dis-
cusses the “aftercourse” of characters’ lives in his 2012 introduction to
Dubliners, noting that of Eveline, “Her life will turn on the thing which
did not happen, which might have been,”20 meaning, she never got on that
boat with Frank. She never eloped with Frank. She chickened out. She was
“paralyzed” by her own fear, critics have argued for decades. In her case,
the thin end of the wedge that would pry her away from her home, her
job, and her family begins hammering in once Frank elbows his way into
her life and offers her an alternative one. That is the start of something, an
influence, a precedent.
14 C. A. CULLETON
If we focus on the beginnings of each story, how things start, we might

be surprised to see that each of the main characters is starting something
in each story, a discovery that in itself contradicts the standard readings
that focus on paralysis in Dubliners. This was one of the things I noticed
in my rereading the book last year: in each story, something is beginning
to get underway, something is starting. In “The Sisters,” Father Flynn
is starting to die. In “An Encounter,” the boys are starting their day of
adventure seeking. In “Araby,” the young boy is starting to fall in love
with Mangan’s sister. In “Eveline,” the evening is beginning to invade
the avenue. Eveline has finished writing her letters and is about to meet
Frank at the North Wall. She is starting to consider another life for herself.
“Everything changes,”21 she notes. In “After the Race,” the race is over,
but the night’s festivities are just beginning. In “Two Gallants,” Corley
and Lenehan set into motion their final exploitation of the slavey. In “The
Boarding House,” Mrs. Mooney is planning her afternoon’s maneuvering
of Bob Doran. She is beginning, in fact, to get her daughter off her hands.
Things are starting for Bob Doran, too: Doran is beginning to think he’s
being had, and at the thick end of that wedge is marriage: “Once you
are married,” his instinct told him, “you are done for.”22 Mrs. Mooney,
Polly, and the pugilistic Jack are sure to hammer the wedge in deep, leav-
ing Doran stuck with only one tenable position from which to meet Mrs.
Mooney’s demands for reparations: marrying Polly. In “A Little Cloud,”
the story begins with movement, too. Chandler is starting off on his trip
to meet up with Gallaher, whom he’d been thinking about since lunch-
time. “For the first time in his life,” we are told, “he felt himself superior to
the people he passed” on his way to Corless’s. Gallaher will get Chandler
all “liquor[ed] up,”23 and Chandler will go home and start to hate his life.
“Counterparts” begins with Farrington being summoned—the start of his
being scolded for not having the Bodley-Kirwan contract ready by four
o’clock. In “Clay,” the women have finished their tea, and the cook and
the dummy begin to clear away the tea-things. This indicates that Maria
can go change her clothes and start off on her trip to Joe’s house. In “A
Painful Case,” Mr. Duffy “finds himself sitting beside two ladies in the
Rotunda.”24 So begins his fraught relationship with Emily Sinico and her
daughter, Mary. “Ivy Day in the Committee Room” opens as we see the
men beginning to wait restlessly for their “spondulics” and the basket of
stout. In “A Mother,” Mrs. Kearney starts to court Hoppy Holohan and
begins inserting herself into the management of the musical program. She
arranges the program carefully so that it hastens and highlights the start
of her daughter Kathleen’s musical triumph in Dublin, but it is actually

the start of Kathleen’s mismanaged and fleeting career. In “Grace,” Tom
Kernan is just beginning to come around after his mysterious fall down the
stairs. And finally, in “The Dead,” the Misses Morkans’s party is starting,
and Lily is already beginning to lose her breath. Instead of paralysis, then,
what we have at the beginning of each story in the collection is incredible
movement.
All of the action, all of the beginnings, counteract arguments readers
have been making for decades about character paralysis, stasis, and para-
lytic tension in Dublin, because there is a lot of movement, lots of things
happening, at the start of each story. By continuing to frame Dubliners
as if it were a still life, as Oona Frawley describes the collection in her
Introduction to Memory Ireland, calling the book “a purposeful still-
life (governed by paralysis after all),”25 we disservice the book. Once we
embrace the reality that the city and its characters are filled with move-
ment, we find ourselves in a new Dublin imaginary, one not crippled or
stalled by moral and intellectual paralysis but one rife with possibilities,
optimistic, even. Morgan cautions, “This affirmative dynamic is notable
in Dubliners … but is lost sight of if we see the book only as so many nar-
ratives of paralysis.”26 “Eveline,” he writes, “a narrative of inertia if any
is, turns on Eveline Hill’s yearning for a decent life: ‘Why should she be
unhappy?’ she asks herself.”27 “An Encounter,” too, promises optimism
and excitement, for example, even as the boys plan their day of hooky the
night before. Determined to “break out of the weariness of school-life
for one day at least,”28 the narrator, with Leo Dillon and Mahony, makes
“the last arrangements,” and then he reports that by the time they broke
away from each other for the night, they “were all vaguely excited.”29 The
next morning, as he waits for his friends at the Canal Bridge, his mood
continues to climb, and he describes himself as “very happy,” drumming
his fingers, even, as he waits:
All the branches of the tall trees which lined the mall were gay with little
light green leaves and the sunlight slanted through them on to the water.
The granite stone of the bridge was beginning to be warm and I began to
pat it with my hands in time to an air in my head. I was very happy.30
It is difficult to trust this boy’s optimism because it seems the product

of overacting, as if he were trying to deflect attention away from what
would be obvious to many passersby: that he is a young boy, alone, and
16 C. A. CULLETON
not in school. The humming to himself and the tapping out a beat, he
likely thinks, make him appear nonchalant when in fact he must be quite
nervous. After all, he admits that last night he “slept badly.”31 While it is
nonetheless this very kind of nervous optimism that propels characters into
each story’s beginning, it is the same optimism that continually fails them:
the boys never make it to the Pigeon House; Chandler’s excitement at the
prospect of seeing Gallaher again is quickly disappointed after spending an
hour with the old friend; Jimmy Doyle’s fever pitch dissolves into a throb-
bing, irreparable headache; the boy’s excitement at going to the bazaar in
“Araby” is crushed not only by his uncle’s lateness and drunkenness, but
also by the tawdriness he discovers at the marketplace; and alas, Gabriel’s
optimistic lust is frustrated, as well.
And for all this misplaced or failed optimism, the Joyce who wrote these
stories was not a Joyce who despised Dublin or its inhabitants. We might
consider, instead, that it was a Joyce who was sick of waiting, an impatient
Joyce wishing things would start in Dublin, some kind of push toward
nationhood. Just as each story opens with something starting, each story
also opens with the inevitable waiting for that something to start. The boy
in “The Sisters” is waiting for a sign that the priest has died. The boy in “An
Encounter” is waiting for his two co-conspirators to meet him at the Canal
Bridge. The boy in “Araby” waits for Mangan’s sister to notice him: “At
last she spoke to me,” he says, and admits that, “When she addressed the
first words to me I was so confused that I did not know what to answer.”32
Eveline is waiting for the right time to leave for the boat; Jimmy Doyle is
waiting to invest his money in Ségouin’s motor establishment at his father’s
behest. The slavey in “Two Gallants” is waiting for Corley to show up.
“She’ll be there all right. I always let her wait a bit,” Corley says,33 much
the same way Mrs. Mooney waits a bit before sending Mary upstairs to
summon Doran, just as Polly remembered, then, “what she had been wait-
ing for” once she’s called downstairs to speak with Bob Doran,34 just as
Little Chandler is waiting for his “sober inartistic life” to change,35 just as
Farrington makes his boss wait while he makes his way to Alleyne’s office
upstairs with heavy steps and halts by the man’s door “puffing with labour
and vexation,”36 just as the men wait in the Committee Room for Mr.
Tierney’s return—“I wish he’d turn up,” one says.37 Waiting to start; such
was Joyce’s Dublin. I am reminded that Terry Eagleton famously asked in
a 2006 essay on Waiting for Godot whether waiting was “doing something,
or the suspension of it?”38 Joyce, I think, would agree with the first part,
that waiting was doing something. But it seems that everything in Dublin
begins with a “false lull.” Even Beckett’s Godot opens with a false lull when,
with an exhausted flourish, Estragon gives up after attempting unsuccess-
fully to take off his boot.
If we consider the historical moment in which these stories were pro-
duced—pre-Easter Rising, pre-Irish Free State—instead of seeing a writer
mourn the Dublin he exiled himself from, or instead of seeing a writer
shaming his fellow Dubliners out of disgust or out of disdain for them,
we might look at Joyce as a motivator or an accelerant of change; after all,
this is the same Joyce who wrote in his 1900 paper “Drama and Life” that
“Even the most commonplace, the deadest among the living, may play
a part in a great drama.”39 The stories themselves function like wedges
doing all they can to split and also not to split Joyce’s characters, Joyce’s
city, Joyce’s dream of an independent Ireland. Perhaps the characters who
have been criticized all these years for their paralysis are not paralyzed at all;
they are, instead, wedged, stuck in a particular position that prevents their
moving for the moment. Just as a wedge is pressed into a space to hold
something in place, like a doorstop, it is also used to force things apart,
like the cleaver Mr. Mooney “went for his wife with.”40 It is used both to
prevent movement and to force movement. This is to say that we know
Joyce wasn’t living in a bubble. Luke Gibbons notes in his 2015 book
Joyce’s Ghosts that “Joyce’s work is set in a city on the verge of revolt,”41
and Morgan notes that “Irish historical and political realities are indeed
woven into the fabric of Dubliners.”42 No matter where Joyce was living,
he read Irish newspapers all of the time. He had the United Irishman sent
to him, for example, after he left Dublin in 1904, and as Frank Callanan
notes, it became Joyce’s “single continuous source of intelligence on con-
temporary Ireland.”43 Joyce knew that revolution was underfoot in Dublin
(his lessons with Patrick Pearse must have taught him at least that much),
even if it wasn’t happening in the way he thought it should. His articles
about Ireland for Il Piccolo della Sera44 in Trieste indicate unequivocally
that his patience for Irish and English politics was exhausted. He had seen
the Celtic twilight fade along the broken light of Irish myths, watched
promising revivalist organizations yield their aesthetic vision to the rabble-
ment, and mourned the dissolution-by-informer of well-organized politi-
cal movements in Ireland such as Fenianism. Although Richard Ellmann
notes in his biography that Joyce “had evaluated the [Easter] rising as
useless,” he also notes that Joyce predicted that same spring that “Some
day he and Giorgio would go back to wear the shamrock in an indepen-
dent Ireland.”45 Luke Gibbons notes that “Joyce had decided that 1916
18 C. A. CULLETON
was a lucky year for him.”46 By the time Joyce finishes writing Dubliners,
then, it seems to me that the trope of paralysis, which Joyce penned into
his first story only after it had been published in the Irish Homestead, is
no longer the useful organizing principle we once thought it was. Instead
of letting paralysis force or stunt our critical interpretations, I suggest we
focus on Joyce’s compulsion with how things start, and consider paralysis,
hopelessness, and the gnomon as simply the start of one of the stories and
not a global imperative for our understanding the book.
Because I am so amused by the expression “the thin end of the wedge,”
the figure of the wedge now has captured my imagination lately, and I’m
finding it useful in talking about Dubliners. The story “Eveline” provides
a good example of the paradoxical contradiction inherent in the wedge,
in that it forces something into immovability but also forces things apart.
Eveline is standing there unmoved at the end of the story, but she is also
separating herself from her relationship with Frank. Eveline is often char-
acterized by her supposed passivity stemming from the way the story
begins, or more precisely, from the way the narrator presents her: “She
sat at the window watching the evening invade the avenue. Her head was
leaned against the window curtains and in her nostrils was the odour of
dusty cretonne. She was tired.”47 As the story opens, it is the thin end of
the wedge of nightfall. Later, “[t]he evening deepened in the avenue” so
much so that “the white of two letters in her lap grew indistinct.”48 Yet
even as the darkness deepens, Eveline is still in the same position she was in
at the opening of the story. Clearly Eveline has sat staring out this window
before. The simple detail given us by the narrator that “few people passed”
lets us know that “this is not the first time that she has been so attentive
to the scene,” Christine Cusick notes, because the word few invites us to
imagine a time when Eveline might have seen several people passing by.
Cusick adds, “The window serves as a tenuous lens between the domestic
interior space that has a hold on Eveline through obligation and promises
to a deceased mother, and the exterior space of the urban environment.”49
“[S]he continued to sit by the window, leaning her head against the win-
dow curtain, inhaling the odour of dusty cretonne,”50 startled out of her
reverie only when a vision of her mother lays “its spell on the very quick of
her being.”51 Eveline is not sitting there passively “doing nothing,” para-
lyzed with fear about the repercussions of her imminent departure, nor is
she listless about leaving. Rather, she is thinking, she is preoccupied, she is
absorbed in nostalgia. She is inhaling the smell of the cretonne by choice,
the same way one might hug a lover’s old sweater to get the smell off of
it. We learn, too, that “she was tired.”52 These are all good reasons for her
to sit there and look as if she’s doing nothing, to go back to the comment
made by Oona Frawley about Dubliners being a “still life.” Framed as a
still life, the window becomes her frame; she, a tableau vivant. She is tired,
but presumably she has a lot to do before she meets Frank at the North
Wall. It could be that writing those letters was the last thing on her to-do
list, and they likely produced a surge of emotions. Although Cusick refers
in her essay to “the story’s ending, Eveline’s paralysis against the iron rail-
ing,”53 I want to argue that just as she is not paralyzed or unduly passive
at the beginning of the story, neither is she paralyzed at the end of her
story: she’s grasping that railing with every ounce of strength she has. She
is wedged there. Stuck.
Likewise, the horse, Johnny, in “The Dead,” isn’t paralyzed either,
though I’ve seen it argued that his going “round and round” the statue
of King Billy indicates a kind of paralysis. But in true paralysis, one loses
the ability to move. It is different from not moving: one cannot move. In
Dubliners, there is no loss of muscle function. If anything, the characters
are torpid, not paralyzed, or they may find themselves, as Morgan notes,
“like Lenehan’s voice in ‘Two Gallants,’ ‘winnowed of vigour.’”54 Luke
Gibbons prefers the term “enervation” and notes that after the Famine,
the entire culture seemed reduced to it.55 Eveline is going to let go of
the iron railing sometime after the boat leaves the North Wall with Frank
on it. She’s not going to stay wedged there forever. She’ll get on with
her life. She’ll go to work tomorrow. One might even imagine that she
races home to get the two letters off the kitchen table before her father
and Harry read them. She has to protect her secret that she was about to
“run away with a fellow” because of what she wonders earlier in the story:
“What would they say of her in the Stores when they found out?”56 So,
no, Eveline is not paralyzed, and instead of there being no going back for
her, she’ll have to go back.
The notion of stasis or paralysis that has been discussed by readers and
critics for decades does not hold up for any of the stories. Even when it has
been argued that the characters are at their most paralytic, they are still doing
something. Gabriel, at the end of “The Dead,” stares out the window at the
falling snow, but “generous tears fill his eyes,” and his soul even swoons.57
That is not paralysis; it is more akin to something like suspension. Gabriel is
suspended in that pose, arrested, thinking, reflecting. If this story were a film
one might call the ending a freeze-frame. But freeze-frames do not compel
movie watchers to imagine that what’s in that frame stays that way forever.
20 C. A. CULLETON
No one believes that the delusional Norma Desmond, for example, in the
1950 film Sunset Boulevard will stay forever ready for De Mille’s close-up,
even after “her image goes into a blurry soft-focus” at the end.58 As such,
Gabriel will have to go back to being Gabriel eventually. There is not “no
going back” for him. That’s not an option for him or anyone else in the
stories.
Consider poor Jimmy Doyle. He is not paralyzed at the end of “After
the Race”: he has “leaned his elbows on the table and rested his head
between his hands, counting the beats of his temples”59 and trying not to
let the light devastate him entirely. The story doesn’t end in p aralysis—it
ends almost literally in denouement. One sees the unknotting of Jimmy
Doyle; but, of course, one must assume he will eventually leave the table
and tell his father the sad tale of his gambled-away inheritance. So, there’s
not “no going back” for him, either, at the end of the story. In fact, many
of the characters in Dubliners do “go back.” Maria returns to Dublin
by Lamplight laundry; and regardless of Smith’s “paltry stratagem,”60
Murphy and Smith return to their respective abodes after a rather trou-
bling day; and after his disappointment at the Araby bazaar, the young boy
presumably takes the rails back to Westland Row Station, goes to bed, and
begins the day all over again the next morning; and Tom Kernan will go
home and may very well verify his accounts, and “rectify this and this,” as
Father Purdon suggests, given God’s grace.61 Even the story that seems to
end with a clear finality—“A Mother,” in which Mrs. Kearney creates such
a scene that she ruins her daughter’s starting career—even in that story
there is not no going back because Mrs. Kearney warns Holohan, “I’m not
done with you yet,”62 which means, in fact, that she’ll be back. So for all of
the talk about paralysis in Dubliners, I’m beginning to think of the stories
in Dubliners like a collection of a Keystone Kops film shorts—we’ve got
characters running over here, racing back, running back and forth, trying
to lose each other, just as Corley attempts to abscond with the sovereign
at the end of “Two Gallants,” or trying to be the better manipulator as in
“A Mother” or “The Boarding House.” The stories offer frenzied move-
ment as the characters race against time to hide their incompetence or to
retrieve the evidence of it. Paralysis, it seems clear, has become a rather
limited metaphor to invoke when discussing Dubliners.
The wedge may be more effective. Dubliners itself is arranged like a
wedge. Beginning with the young boy and progressing from youth to the
old age of the Morkan sisters, the wedge widens with the fullness of time
and experience. Continually hammered by defeat and failure, and bound
to “go back” after each pitiful episode, these characters and their lives will
eventually come apart, having been steadily and repeatedly wedged by cir-
cumstance and by history. Consider Mrs. Sinico, for example. When did the
thin end of the wedge begin hammering its way into her life? Other than
James Duffy’s snubbing her, what other forces steadily drove the wedge
until Mrs. Sinico is found dead on a train track, literally wedged under the
ten o’clock train from Kingstown after she was “caught by the buffer of the
engine and fell to the ground”? According to the story, “No blame attached
to anyone.”63 Mrs. Sinico, four years later from the beginning of the story,
finds herself caught in the freighted circumstances of extreme loneliness,
and she acts on it. She has made it a “habit of crossing the lines late at
night from platform to platform,”64 we are told. She lives on, however, in
the “laborious drone of the engine reiterating the syllables of her name” at
the end of the story as Mr. Duffy stands outside under a tree,65 what Paul
K. Saint-Amour and Karen R. Lawrence nicely refer to as the train’s “dactylic
cargo,”66 the “rhythm of the engine pounding in his ears”—“Emily Sinico.
Emily Sinico”—until Duffy “allow[s] the rhythm to die away,”67 the noise
dying out like a reverse wedge, in decrescendo, going from “pounding” to
“perfectly silent.”68 We’ve already seen this decrescendo, in “Eveline” when
“[t]he man out of the last house passed on his way home; she heard his foot-
steps clacking along the concrete pavement and afterwards crunching on
the cinder path before the new red houses,”69 going from the “impenetrable
strength of concrete to the dusty surface of slag.”70
Like early important discussions of Dubliners that led us to see paraly-
sis as a strong motif in the collection, alerting us to a perceived pattern of
paralysis across the text, discussion focused on the gnomon during the last
one hundred years points readers to what is missing in a story or to some-
thing that is broken, since the gnomon is itself a “damaged rectangle.”71 The
figure of the wedge is another important trope in Dubliners and is equally
useful as a tool or a governing shape that helps readers sort out what Vicki
Mahaffey nicely terms the “geometries of fact”72 in the collection. Mahaffey
and Michael Groden note that readers of Dubliners often produce criticism
that tries to “restore the missing corner, to turn the gnomon back into the
parallelogram,”73 or a perfect rectangle, a compulsion much like trying to
square the wedge. I’ve come to think after focusing attention on the wedge
that we have spent enough decades exploring what is missing, or paralyzed
or intractable in the fifteen stories in Dubliners. Let us focus on what is devel-
oping or starting. That is, if the gnomon directs us to what is missing, the
wedge is all about what is developing—the beginning, the establishment of
22 C. A. CULLETON
an atmosphere that is always what it is becoming. This is how Dubliners

stories develop. They start out one way but become something else. When
we first read “Two Gallants,” for example, we might have thought it was
going to be a story about sex. Winds up it is a story about extortion. If we
pay attention to the starts in Dubliners, and turn our focus away from the
facile trope of paralysis and the gnomonic search for what is missing, the
stories change tremendously, and we come to a new paradigm for Dubliners
that underlies kinetic and frenetic movement instead of paralysis and stasis.
This collection of essays, Rethinking Joyce’s “Dubliners,” is published in
the year of the hundredth anniversary of the Easter Rising, and it reminds
us of the exceptional movement that was taking place in Ireland as Joyce was
working to get Dubliners published. Newly released files from the National
Archives of the Dublin Metropolitan Police (DMP), for example, reveal the
extent of the heady revolutionary atmosphere in Dublin at the time, and
they map the reach of the DMP’s surveillance of leaders of what would be
the Easter Rising. “The police were obsessive in monitoring the comings and
goings of those they suspected of plotting sedition,” notes Ronan McGreevy
in the Irish Times, adding that despite the surveillance, “the Rising, when
it happened, was regarded as a massive failure of intelligence.”74 My linking
Joyce’s work with the Rising, as you’ll see, is absolutely not to suggest that
Joyce could ask as culpably (and brazenly) as Yeats did in “Man and the
Echo” something like, “Did that play of mine send out/Certain men the
English shot?”75; but by rejecting one hundred plus years later, the notion
that paralysis informs, even codifies each story—entrenched readings that
Gibson attributes to early criticism by Hugh Kenner, Anthony Burgess, and
Donald Torchiana76—we can get closer to the national liberation Joyce was
hoping to inspire with his collection, and we can see Dubliners, as Morgan
does, as a “liberation project.”77 Gibbons notes that
To many in Ireland, the turn of the century, far from being a period sunk in
a supposedly typical Irish gloom or inertia, seemed to hold out the possibil-
ity, even the prospect, of transformation. The idea influenced the prevailing
mood for several years. This mood or temper was an authentically turn-
of-the-century one, and had to do with endings and new beginnings. It is
effectively captured in two words, “national resurgence.”78
He adds, “The Joyce of 1898–1903 is caught up in the new mood of

‘national resurgence,’”79 a term that recurred in the writings of the day
and a term Joyce used in “Ireland, Island of Saints and Sages.”
I am not trying to appropriate Joyce’s work in order to put it into a

useful context, or to rework his stories so that Joyce comes off as “an illu-
minating precursor, an anticipator, even a prophet for our time,” as Carlo
Salzani80 argues has happened with Walter Benjamin’s work, although that
is something that’s almost irresistible to try and work out in this “decade
of centenaries.” Rather, as Oona Frawley points out,
Joyce’s texts and the characters within them come to themselves reflect
on and deliver analyses of history. These analyses confront particularly the
fraught relationship between the individual and the historical past; the crisis
of colonial history in relation to the colonized state; and the relationship
between the individual’s memory of his or her own past and the past of the
broader culture. Joyce, in other words, is an exemplary author to consider
in relation to questions of how it is that history is remembered and recycled,
as well as how the individual-as-actor produces, participates in, and impacts
that history as it unfolds in the present.81
Frawley also gestures to the work of scholars such as Kevin Whelan, Anne
Fogarty, Luke Gibbons, and John Richard who reveal “how Joyce’s work
represents and unpacks the past for us.”82
Joyce fully expected his stories to yield change. He wrote to Grant
Richards in June, 1906, that, “It is not my fault that the odour of ashpits
and old weeds and offal hangs around my stories,”83 and this has been
often quoted; but a month earlier he wrote to him to insist that Richards
retain the stories exactly as written, saying:
The points on which I have not yielded are the points which rivet the book
together. If I eliminate them what becomes of the chapter of the moral his-
tory of my country? I fight to retain them because I believe that in compos-
ing my chapter of moral history in exactly the way I have composed it I have
taken the first step towards the spiritual liberation of my country.84
Years later, in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Joyce has Stephen
curse the spiritual paralysis of the Irish “who entrust their wills and minds
to others that they ensure for themselves a life of spiritual paralysis,”85 one
imagines, in an effort to incite once again the spiritual liberation of his
country that he tried to rouse at least a decade earlier. As Garry Leonard
reminds us in The Cambridge Companion to James Joyce, “The [Dubliners]
stories are interested in issues of identity and the self, but they are equally
24 C. A. CULLETON
involved with issues of politics and what it feels like to be a part of Ireland
as a nation with a particular history and a particular place within the British
Empire,”86 wedged, we might say, by imperial history.
As the thin end of the wedge widens into the thick end, there is move-
ment, there is development, there is very little paralysis. And the wedge is
a useful tool because once something starts in Dubliners, it is pried apart
immediately; even if at the start it looks promising or inconsequential, it
is going to turn into something big. This omnipresent thin end of the
wedge is always in the background at the start of things, always hinting
that things will be driven apart. Families, situations, opportunities, colo-
nial relations—these will be rended.
In “The Sisters,” Eliza pinpoints the thin-end-of-the-wedge moment for
Father Flynn: “It was that chalice he broke,” she says. “That was the begin-
ning of it.”87 Eliza seems to imply that there was no going back after that. Yet
Father Flynn does come back. He comes back in the boy’s dream. The boy’s
dream of Flynn asking for forgiveness may indicate the start of something,
too, that omnipresent thin end of the wedge, because it hints at what will
likely be years of nightmares for the boy. The boy claims he feels a sensation
of freedom, “as if [he’s] been freed from something” by Flynn’s death;88
but that is another beginning, another thin end of the wedge, because the
reader knows the boy will never really be free of the experience or the confu-
sion, and that it will hammer away at him until it likely undoes him.
Considering the “beginning of influence” and how it affects the char-
acters in Dubliners, we think of Mangan’s sister’s influence on the young
romantic; we think of Frank’s influence on Eveline; or the Continentals’
influence on Jimmy Doyle; Lenehan’s influence on Corley, Corley’s on
Lenehan, and Corley’s on the slavey; we consider Maria’s influence on Joe
and Alphy, even as we wonder what wedged the brothers apart. These are
all relationships where one character predominantly influences another’s
actions. Then there is Jack, Polly, and Mrs. Mooney’s conspiracy of influence
on Bob Doran; Gallaher’s influence on Chandler; Mrs. Sinico’s influence on
James Duffy and vice-versa; Mrs. Kearney’s influence on “the Cometty,”89
not to mention her daughter’s career; we think of the influence of drink and
the subsequent influences of Father Purdon, temperance, and religion on
Tom Kernan; and, last but not least, the beginning of what will, no doubt,
be Michael Furey’s abiding influence on Gabriel. It is precisely these begin-
ning influences that eventually wedge Joyce’s Dubliners into stuck but not
paralyzed positions, and these simple beginnings, these new influences that
Joyce develops in each story, drive the stories to their conclusions.
Each story turns, in other words, on those beginning influences, and

the seemingly harmless thin end of the wedge eventually comes to push
these characters into untenable disappointments, failures, and transgres-
sions of several types. Once wedged, there is no hope of escape and no
happy endings. The best the characters can do is unwedge themselves
and go back home. Eveline lets go of the railing. The boys Mahony and
“Smith” return home disappointed and changed. The boy and his aunt
return home after an awkward sitting with Eliza. Gabriel goes to sleep,
he must. Jimmy Doyle pleads for reconciliation and pardon from his dad.
After probably drinking away their shining sovereign, Corley and Lenehan
still have that debt looming over their heads and their days of leniency
from their loan shark are numbered. Chandler will resent his life, his wife’s
eyes, and Gallaher’s offensive personality for the rest of his life, and in Mrs.
Mooney’s boarding house, a wedding must now be planned. There is no
paralysis or stasis. These characters are moving around Dublin as freely
as the Liffey itself, and right here is the point exactly: readers know that
the landscape is essential in Joyce’s works. He builds his characters and
stories continuously around Dublin geography and around the Dublin
thoroughfare, understanding that physical, urban space is infused with
both political context and critique. Marjorie Howes notes in “Geography,
scale, and narrating the nation” that “Joyce takes up the issue of narrating
the nation in a kind of geopolitical representation,”90 and in her essay on
“bricolage of place” in Dubliners that appears in the 2014 book Eco- Joyce,
Christine Cusick notes that “long before any formal critical discourse
was named ‘ecocritical,’ [Joyce’s work] was asking the essential questions
about the intersection of environment … and politics.”91 That so many of
Joyce’s characters walk all over Dublin’s imperial urban territories as he
did all of his life, especially enjoying long, long, long walks that took him
nowhere and back, their movements have no other choice than to resolve
themselves as change. That is true of these stories, as well; they are calls
for a kind of geographic and geopolitical freedom that Joyce knows the
characters simply do not have, not in turn-of-the-century Dublin, not in
1914 Dublin. Joyce’s “clear diagnosis,” in Ezra Pound’s words, of the
problems in Dublin that needed to be addressed worked, for Pound, as a
call of counter-insurgency. Pound interpreted Dubliners as a dictum: Fix
these and there will be no need for revolution. But Luke Gibbons in his
essay “‘Old Haunts’: Joyce, the Republic, and Photographic Memory”
suggests that for other readers, “[Joyce’s] writing was a symptom of the
rebellion”92:
26 C. A. CULLETON
That Joyce’s work both drew on and helped to articulate the energies that
coalesced in the Easter Rising and the struggle for independence was appar-
ent not only to [H.G.] Wells but also to many of the insurgents themselves.
Much is made of the complex nature of Joyce’s engagement with Irish
nationalism but little has been written on the equally complex responses of
Irish nationalists to Joyce.93
Gibbons continues, suggesting that “Joyce offered cold comfort, it is true,

to those holding on to the vestiges of ‘romantic Ireland’ fostered by the
Revival, but perhaps his writing was valued for precisely this reason: its
candor, comic deflation, and capacity to instill hope in dark times.”94
I suggest that the wedge might offer a new geometrical paradigm for
reading Dubliners, one that might very well supplant the gnomon and
put an end to its tyranny (and believe me, I love the gnomon. Like every-
one else, I’ve gotten some good years out of the gnomon); but instead
of “puzzling [our] heads to extract meaning”95 from what is missing or
unfinished in these stories—which is precisely what keeps the young boy
up at night in “The Sisters”—instead of berating, in front of our students,
no less, the characters and the country for the stasis and paralysis that they
invite and breed or are blind to, let us examine what is there and what
is moving about: Joyce’s characters, the gratefully oppressed, in all their
ignorance and pain.
“The thin end of the wedge, that’s the way it begins”96; that’s the way
any revolution begins. That is how one comes to a new Dublin imaginary.
Now there’s no going back. Rethinking the old tropes of paralysis and
mobility in Dubliners opens up new ways of seeing the lively unfolding
action of each story; and now, imagining the impact that the unfolding
action may have inspired years later after Joyce’s citizens got a good look
at themselves in his nicely polished looking glass, we can gesture toward a
new reading of the stories at a significant historical turn in Dublin. Myopic
Yeats hadn’t seen the political movement underfoot in Ireland, so much so
that he had to pen a palinode in 1916 apologizing for assessing the Irish as
unromantic in his earlier poem “September 1913.” For years, Yeats admit-
ted after 1916, that all he had were “polite, meaningless words” and more
“polite meaningless words” for the rebels. But as far away as Pula, Trieste,
and Rome, Joyce could sense that something was happening, that things
were moving, that something was starting or was about to start. And he
was waiting for it. Waiting isn’t doing nothing. Waiting is not a false lull.
While Dubliners was published two years before the Easter Rising, we,
in this collection, very much see in these stories a culture poised on the
brink of explosion as a clear precursor to the irrevocable changes mark-
ing 1916 Dublin, and one hundred years later, we seize this opportu-
nity to read Dubliners, fifteen stories with an irrepressible “bite” in them,
centennially.
Notes
1. James Joyce, Dubliners, ed. Terence Brown (New York: Penguin Books,
1992), 126.
2. Ibid., 290.
3. Eric Partridge, A Dictionary of Clichés, 5th ed. (New York: Routledge,
1978), 456.
4. Joyce, Dubliners, 1.
5. Jack Morgan, Joyce’s City: History, Politics, and Life in “Dubliners”
(Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2015), 49.
2013), 58.
7. Ibid., 53.
8. Saikat Majumdar, Prose of the World: Modernism and the Banality of Empire
(New York: Columbia University Press, 2013), 39.
9. “Poverty and Health,” National Archives of Ireland, http://www.census.
nationalarchives.ie
10. See note 4 above.
11. Accessed (“Googled” those terms) on October 3, 2015.
12. Joyce, Dubliners, 5
13. Ibid.
14. Ibid., 2.
15. James Joyce to Constantine Curran, Dublin, N.D., 1904, in Letters of James
Joyce. Vol. 1, ed. Stuart Gilbert (New York: The Viking Press, 1966), 55.
16. James Joyce, Ulysses, ed. Gabler, et al. (New York: Vintage Books, 1986),
7.763–765.
17. Ibid, 7.761.
18. Ibid, 7.762.
19. Thomas Jackson Rice in his Joyce, Chaos, and Complexity notes of the
“Matcham’s Masterstroke” passage that, “This textual intrusion reminds
the reader of four basic facts of human existence: (1) minute causes can
have momentous consequences; (2) events appear to be purely accidental
28 C. A. CULLETON
and contingent in the present moment of their occurrence; (3) these same
events, once displaced into the past and reviewed ‘as in a retrospective
arrangement’ (U 14.1044), seem to have been fully deterministic, to have
‘determined the whole aftercourse of … our lives’; and (4) in the real
world, as we know it and as contemporary physics attests, we can establish
with certainty that determinate effects result from determinate causes, no
matter how apparently insignificant” (83).
20. Colm Tóibín, introduction to Dubliners, by James Joyce (Edinburgh:

Cannongate, 2012), xii.
22. Ibid., 61.
23. Ibid., 72
24. Ibid., 105.
25. Oona Frawley, “James Joyce, Cultural Memory, and Irish Studies,” in
Memory Ireland. Vol. 4. James Joyce and Cultural Memory, ed. Oona
Frawley and Katherine O’Callaghan (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press,
2014), 4.
26. Morgan, Joyce’s City, 9.
27. Ibid., 8.
29. Ibid.
30. Ibid.
31. Ibid.
32. Ibid., 23.
33. Ibid., 47.
34. Ibid., 64 (emphasis mine).
35. Ibid., 68.
36. Ibid., 82.
37. Ibid., 131.
38. Terry Eagleton, “Political Beckett?” in Waiting for Godot in New Orleans:
A Field Guide, ed. Paul Chan (New York: Creative Time, 2010), 60–61.
39. Ellsworth Mason and Richard Ellmann, ed., The Critical Writings of James
Joyce (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989), 45.
41. Luke Gibbons, Joyce’s Ghosts: Ireland, Modernism, and Memory (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2015), xv.
42. Ibid., 3.
43. Gibson, The Strong Spirit, 34.
44. Charles Joyce to Stanislaus Joyce, Dublin, September 3, 1912, in Letters of
James Joyce, Vol. 2, ed. Richard Ellmann (New York: The Viking Press, 1966).
Joyce’s brother, Charles, wrote that Joyce’s barrister, Dixon, told Joyce it
was “a pity that [he] did not use his ‘undoubted’ talent for a better purpose
than writing a book like Dubliners. Why did he not use his talents for the bet-
terment of his country and his people? Jim replied that he was probably the
only Irishman who wrote leading articles for the Italian press and that all of his
articles in ‘Il Piccolo’ were about Ireland and the Irish people” (316).
45. Richard Ellmann, ed., James Joyce (Oxford: Oxford University Press,

1982), 399.
46. Luke Gibbons, “‘Old Haunts’: Joyce, the Republic, and Photographic
Memory,” in Memory Ireland. Vol. 4. James Joyce and Cultural Memory, ed.
Oona Frawley and Katherine O’Callaghan (Syracuse: Syracuse University
Press, 2014), 187.
49. Christine Cusick, “‘Clacking Along the Concrete Pavement’: Economic
Isolation and the Bricolage of Place in Joyce’s Dubliners,” in Eco-Joyce: The
Environmental Imagination of James Joyce, ed. Robert Brazeau and Derek
Gladwin (Cork: Cork University Press, 2014), 165.
53. Cusick, “Clacking Along,” 169.
55. Luke Gibbons, “‘Have You no Homes to Go to?’ James Joyce and the
Politics of Paralysis,” in Semicolonial Joyce, ed. Derek Attridge and Marjorie
Howes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 153.
57. Ibid., 224‐25.
58. AMC Filmsite, “Sunset Boulevard (1950),” http://www.filmsite.org/

suns3.html
59. Joyce, Dubliners, 41–42.
60. Ibid., 20.
61. Ibid., 174.
62. Ibid., 148.
63. Ibid., 111.
64. Ibid., 110.
65. Ibid., 112.
66. Paul K. Saint-Amour and Karen R. Lawrence, “Reopening ‘A Painful
Case,’” in Collaborative “Dubliners.” Joyce in Dialogue, ed. Vicki Mahaffey
(Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2012), 253.
30 C. A. CULLETON
71. Michael Groden and Vicki Mahaffey, “Silence and Fractals in ‘The Sisters,’”
in Collaborative “Dubliners.” Joyce in Dialogue, ed. Vicki Mahaffey
(Syracuse, Syracuse University Press, 2012), 31. They refer to J. E. Cirlot’s
definition of a gnomon as “damaged rectangle” in his Dictionary of Symbols.
72. Ibid., 24.
73. Ibid., 31.
74. Ronan McGreevy, “Secret police files relating to Easter Rising released,” in
Irish Times, http://www.irishtimes.com
75. Seamus Heaney, “On W.B. Yeats’s, ‘The Man and the Echo,’” Harvard
Review 4 (Spring 1993), 96. He discusses this poem as Yeats’s “reviewing
his involvement with the historical events in Ireland over the previous half-
century: events such as the founding of the Abbey Theatre and its political
impact on the lead-up to the 1916 Rising; the Irish War of Independence,
and the destruction of so many of the big houses belonging to the Anglo-
Irish gentry; and other, more private, guilt-inducing events, such as the
nervous breakdown of a young poet and dancer, Margot Collis, with
whom Yeats felt himself half-culpably implicated.”
76. Gibson writes in The Strong Spirit: History, Politics, and Aesthetics in the
Writings of James Joyce, 1898–1915, that, “Until quite recently, criticism
had a rather firmly established view of the young Joyce and his Ireland.
Irish culture at the turn of the century, particularly Dublin culture, was
provincial, mediocre, hemiplegic, stuck,” and he adds in a footnote that
“Kenner was the principal source of and spokesman for this view. See
Dublin’s Joyce, 1–68. See also inter alia Burgess, ‘Paralysed City,’ 224–40;
and Torchiana, Backgrounds for ‘Dubliners’ passim” (9).
79. Ibid., 19.
80. Carlo Salzani, Constellations of Reading: Walter Benjamin in Figures of
Actuality (Bern: Peter Lang, 2008), 13.
81. Frawley, “Cultural Memory,” 1–2.
82. Gibbons, “Old Haunts,” 187.
83. James Joyce to Grant Richards, Trieste, June 1906, in Letters of James
Joyce. Vol. 1, 63–64.
84. Ibid., 62–63.
85. James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (New York: Penguin
Books, 1982), 146.
86. Garry Leonard, “Dubliners,” in The Cambridge Companion to James Joyce
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 90.
88. Ibid., 4.
89. Ibid., 139.
90. Marjorie Howes, “‘Goodbye Ireland I’m going to Gort’: Geography, Scale
and Narrating the Nation,” in Semicolonial Joyce, ed. Derek Attridge and
Marjorie Howes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 59.
91. Cusick, “Clacking Along,” 161.
92. Gibbons, “Old Haunts,” 187.
93. Ibid., 188.
94. Ibid., 188–89.
96. Ibid., 126.
Bibliography
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———. “‘Old Haunts’: Joyce, the Republic, and Photographic Memory.” In
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(Spring 1993): 96–99.
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———. Letters of James Joyce. Vol. 1. Edited by Stuart Gilbert. New York: The
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———. Letters of James Joyce. Vols. 2 and 3. Edited by Richard Ellmann. New York:
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———. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. New York: Penguin Books, 1982.
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CHAPTER 3
“No There There”: Place, Absence,

and Negativity in “A Painful Case”
Margot Norris
Given the name of Joyce’s collection, the stories in Dubliners tend to have
a geographical focus aimed as much on the location where events occur
as on the characters and their activities. This is true of Joyce’s fiction in
general, and particularly of Ulysses, of course, where the city looms large
throughout the novel as the setting not only of psychological but also of
physical journeys by its people. Critics have long recognized the impor-
tance of Dublin and its geography in Joyce’s work as such titles as Hugh
Kenner’s Dublin’s Joyce and Michael Seidel’s Epic Geography: James Joyce’s
“Ulysses” remind us. But it is particularly relevant to return to the stories of
Dubliners themselves to consider the significance of location, not only as a
map of streets and buildings and landmarks serving as sites of culture, but
also as spaces with outdoor settings in parks and greens, surrounded by
climate and ambience. “A Painful Case” offers an interesting example of
this geographical breadth because it is in some respects a suburban rather
than an urban story, extending not only the dimensions of Dublin’s space
but also its culture beyond the strict confines of its borders, even as it fol-
lows a protagonist who walks and rides and moves throughout the period
of his life that the story tracks. James Duffy lives in Chapelizod, after all,
M. Norris (*)
Department of English (emeritus), University of California, Irvine, Irvine, CA, USA
e-mail: mnorris@uci.edu

DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-39336-0_3
34 M. NORRIS
a setting he chooses very deliberately, because “he wished to be as far as

possible from the city of which he was a citizen and because he found all
the other suburbs of Dublin mean, modern and pretentious.”1 Setting
and place become a curious marker of personality in this story, giving us
at the outset a picture of a man keenly aware not only of his geographical
surroundings, but also of their significance with respect to culture and
class. Chapelizod itself has cultural associations not mentioned as a factor
in Duffy’s choice, and that is its association with the legend of Iseult of
Ireland and her reputed burial place in Chapelizod, giving it the name of
“Iseult’s Chapel.” In the legend, Tristan is sent to Ireland by his uncle,
King Mark, to fetch Iseult and bring her to Cornwall, where he will marry
her. On the voyage, Tristan and Iseult inadvertently drink a potion that
causes them to fall in love and engage in an adulterous affair. The signifi-
cance of this tacit and unstated story hidden in the name of Duffy’s suburb
is its possible prediction that “A Painful Case” may be an adultery story, a
premonition that gains strength when we learn of Duffy’s growing friend-
ship with the married Emily Sinico. It comes as a shock that the affair does
not, in fact, occur, and that “A Painful Case” is something quite different,
a story with a secret, a hidden life, a hole in its narrative that reflects a hole
in the psyche and life of its protagonist. In addition to this focus on holes
as absence, Duffy’s rationale for living in Chapelizod also reveals another
important trait in his persona and in the story in general, and that is an
ongoing negativity, a tendency to register places, persons, and events in
negative terms.
Geography should be something that is decidedly present rather than
absent, something there rather than not there, although Gertrude Stein
changed all that with her famous allusion to the city of Oakland as a place
where “There is no there there.”2 In “A Painful Case,” this absence of
there-ness is signaled by dispersal on the one hand, by Duffy’s almost
incessant walking and wandering from place to place and by either a lack
of description of the places he traverses or their description in negative
terms. This becomes evident not only in the story’s first sentence where
we are given the negative reasons for his residence in Chapelizod, but also
in the location of his house near a “disused distillery,” a distillery that is
no longer there, a shallow river (the Liffey with an uncharacteristic dearth
of water), and his stripped and minimalized living space. Although it is
described as lofty, the initial characterization of his room is negative, its
floor described as “uncarpeted” and its walls “free from pictures.”3 There
is furniture, made chiefly of iron and wood, and it is further c haracterized
“NO THERE THERE” 35
as virtually without color, sporting a black bedstead, white sheets, a

“whiteshaded lamp,” and with its only color a “black and scarlet rug” at
the foot of the bed. The bookshelves are made of white wood. The papers
on his desk include a sheaf which will later contain his most significant
negative comment, the locus of the hole in his story and his personality.
The living space is both orderly and carefully planned, its negativity not a
lack of attraction but an absence of accoutrements that could be there to
give the place a more vibrant life. This absence of something there is also
applied to Duffy’s personality by the narrator, who describes the spirit that
his mouth might have conveyed as “unamiable,” a negative term mitigated
by the lack of harshness in his eyes that, in spite of their hope of finding a
“redeeming instinct” in people, are often “disappointed.”4
And so the negativity of Duffy’s surroundings extends to his person,
which is further described in spatial terms that suggest that even in his per-
sonhood, Duffy is not really there. “He lived at a little distance from his
body, regarding his own acts with doubtful sideglances.”5 This sense that
he is not really there in his own body applies also to his mental conception
of himself, which leads him to regard himself explicitly as an other. “He
had an odd autobiographical habit which led him to compose in his mind
from time to time a short sentence about himself containing a subject in
the third person and a predicate in the past tense.”6 This allusion to the
past tense shows him treating himself not only as an other, but also as
someone who is no longer there, as someone who is deceased, dead. His
negativity inevitably extends to his social surroundings, to his relationship
with other people. He certainly does not interact with strangers, and we
learn that he “never gave alms to beggars.” More importantly, he “had nei-
ther companions nor friends, church nor creed.”7 He does appear to have
family but keeps his contact with them to an absolute minimum, visiting
them only at Christmas and “escorting them to the cemetery when they
died”—that is, when they are no longer there. “He lived his spiritual life
without any communion with others,” we are told. This additional infor-
mation adds fuel to the notion that James Duffy belongs to the realm of
the living dead. And yet there are signs of life that cannot be disregarded.
There is a piano in the house, belonging to his landlady, and he apparently
spends some of his evenings there, possibly playing the music of Mozart.
There are books on his shelves, a “complete Wordsworth,” a Maynooth
catechism, and a manuscript translation of Gerhart Hauptmann’s Michael
Kramer. His spiritual life does have some communion with the minds and
thoughts of others, even if they are there only in music or in language
36 M. NORRIS
rather than in person, and even though in the case of Michael Kramer,
he will commune with a play about a young loner driven to suicide by his
stern father, an unresponsive woman, and contemptuous louts in a tavern.
This reading appears to give Duffy a premonition of his future, although
in his life he will play the role of the insensitive father to Mrs. Sinico,
without recognizing until the end his role in her probable suicide, and
the similarity of her own loneliness to his. Finally, we are given the curi-
ous information that Duffy sometimes fantasizes about robbing his bank.8
What on earth would he do with the money? His aim is clearly to create
yet another empty space, another absence or site of the negative, rather
than to enrich himself or his life in some way.
This largely negative beginning describing the “adventureless tale”9 of
his life is followed, however, by a major expansion of the signs of hope for
a revival, initiated, not surprisingly, by his love of music.10 It begins nega-
tively, with Duffy arriving at a scheduled Rotunda concert only to find
the house “thinly peopled and silent,” not a good sign for a concert and
therefore signaling “a prophecy of failure.”11 Like his own home, here
is another indoor space marked by absence and negativity, a “deserted
house” filled with “empty benches.” But in the silence of that dead space,
he hears a voice, and it communicates to him its disappointment at what
is not there—“What a pity there is such a poor house tonight! It’s so
hard on people to have to sing to empty benches.”12 From her very first
words, Mrs. Sinico identifies herself as an opposite of James Duffy, as
someone familiar with empty and negative spaces but aware, unlike him,
that they can cause sorrow and longing. And we now receive the account
of Duffy looking at this stranger, and seeing his mind take in informa-
tion and details that almost immediately begin to fill the emptiness of
his soul. His response to her on a second meeting at Earlsfort Terrace is
almost startling in the changes it signals in his personality, as we learn that
he “seized the moments when her daughter’s attention was diverted to
become intimate.”13 The only mention of a woman in his life up to this
point has been his landlady, so perhaps this is what has been missing in
Duffy’s life all along, a meaningful woman whose absence has produced
his deadness. If so, then this moment with Mrs. Sinico will be a signifi-
cant turning point for him. Their initial “intimacy” is not romantic, even
though this is what the word suggests, but it does involve a sharing of life
information, her name, her family history, her marital status and situa-
tion. Mrs. Sinico is there and she is already beginning to fill empty spaces
in his experience. The details she reveals give her character a geographical
extension beyond Dublin, and even beyond Ireland. Her Italian name has
resulted from the origin of her husband’s forebears in Leghorn.14 And her
husband’s occupation as captain of a mercantile boat causes him to travel
between Ireland and the Continent, particularly Holland. Captain Sinico
is therefore also a traveler, like Duffy himself, and he too is a figure of
dispersal who is seldom there at home. In that sense, her meeting with
James Duffy might be thought not to bode well for Mrs. Sinico, but we
soon learn that while Duffy will continue to travel around Dublin and its
environs, he will now do so in the company of a newfound companion.
“This was the first of many meetings; they met always in the evening and
chose the most quiet quarters for their walks together.”15 Her family is
clearly not an obstacle to this friendship. He has already met her daugh-
ter, he insists on meeting her husband who mistakes him for a possible
suitor for his daughter, and since the husband is rarely around and the
daughter is out giving music lessons, James Duffy and Mrs. Sinico are
perfectly positioned to intensify their intimacy.
And so, we appear to be at the start of what promises to be an adultery
narrative, on the order of the great nineteenth-century classics Madame
Bovary and Anna Karenina. The intimacy suggested at their second meet-
ing becomes spiritual almost immediately in the sense that what becomes
shared between the new couple is the substance of interior life. “Little by
little he entangled his thoughts with hers. He lent her books, provided her
with ideas, shared his intellectual life with her. She listened to all.”16 It is
almost surprising to learn that there has actually been an inner life there
in Duffy all this time, and even more surprising that he would let it come
out to another person. Their sharing appears somewhat one-sided with
Duffy doing most of the speaking, although “sometimes” Mrs. Sinico,
too, “gave out some fact of her own life.”17 Less surprisingly, his inner
thoughts are predictably negative, expressing his disappointment with the
Irish Socialist Party and his pessimism at possibilities of any political prog-
ress in the country. “No social revolution, he told her, would be likely
to strike Dublin for some centuries.”18 When Mrs. Sinico asks him “why
did he not write out his thoughts,” Duffy’s response becomes even more
bitterly scornful and defensive, disparaging the “phrasemongers” with
whom he would be competing and refusing to offer himself to “the criti-
cisms of an obtuse middle class.”19 His relationship with Mrs. Sinico has
clearly not changed the profound negativity that has been his hallmark,
although he is now willing to communicate it, to open himself up to a
sympathetic listener. This change in his social behavior and attitudes has
38 M. NORRIS
not been generalized, however. There is no indication that he has become

friendlier or more sociable with other people, a situation that has implica-
tions for Mrs. Sinico who, drawn into a condition similar to his own, may
have suffered some loss of closeness to her own family or any friends she
might have had. At the same time, a benefit of the solitary nature of their
relationship may have been for her its promise of privacy and protection
from scrutiny that would make an affair possible and sustainable. Their
ability to retreat to “her little cottage outside Dublin” where they can
spend evenings alone offers the perfect setting. The rambling geography
that has characterized James Duffy’s setting up to this point, living in
Chapelizod, taking a tram to work in the city, taking his meals at Dan
Burke’s and his supper on George’s street, seems to have become focused
on this small suburban cottage where his new life could take root. The
metaphor is even invoked in the sentence that Mrs. Sinico’s “companion-
ship was like a warm soil about an exotic”—an exotic in the sense of a
plant that is not native, that is removed from its natural environment to
be successfully transplanted to another climate. Even so the cottage itself
has many familiar features of the emptiness and solitude of Duffy’s life—a
dark discreet room, isolation, music no longer there if still sounding in the
ear—although now shared rather than experienced alone.
It is in the privacy of this suburban cottage that the social intimacy of
the couple takes on a highly emotional dimension that seems to set the
stage for a romantic culmination. “Little by little as their thoughts entan-
gled they spoke of subjects less remote.”20 Not only their minds but also
their hearts appear to be moving from their different places toward a com-
mon space where they may unite. Indeed, their coming together in that
cottage is characterized as a “union” that “emotionalised his mental life,”
bringing together aspects of Duffy’s personality once rigidly separated but
now capable of becoming united. And yet, even before his shocked, and
shocking, response to Mrs. Sinico’s loving gesture, we are given a warning
that Duffy himself has not yet become one, not yet unified into a single
locus, but remains set apart from himself, with an outside observing and
commenting on an inside, even as he seems to have acquired a s urprising
vertical dimension. “He thought that in her eyes he would ascend to an
angelical stature” suggests that he feels the relationship has improved him,
has perhaps raised him from his ground of negativity and begun lifting
him into a positive emotional and moral sphere, where caring and giv-
ing may replace disdain and withholding. But the old “autobiographi-
cal habit” is still there, obliging him to listen to “the strange impersonal
voice, which he recognised as his own, insisting on the soul’s incurable

loneliness.”21 Duffy’s emotional geography remains sundered, separate, at
the very moment Mrs. Sinico moves to bring it together with her own, by
catching his hand “passionately” and pressing it to her cheek. This chaste
and simple gesture is something Duffy appears not to have experienced in
his adult life and that is a human touch, a physical conjunction of a small
and minor kind that nonetheless utterly shakes his stability. In just that
instance, his negativity returns with full force. “Mr Duffy was very much
surprised. Her interpretation of his words disillusioned him.” Not only is
he not pleased by the affectionate gesture but he also instantly transforms
it into the prompt for a criticism of Mrs. Sinico, a denigration of her char-
acter of the kind we have heard him visit on politicians and phrasemongers
and strangers. The moment precipitates an immediate physical separation.
“He did not visit her for a week.” When he does contact her to ask her
to meet, he carefully plans for a geographical separation from their recent
joint locus of intimacy, the cottage that has now become a “ruined confes-
sional.”22 The term harks back to Duffy’s assumption that some indication
of his pleasure at their emotional entanglement has been misinterpreted
and violated with an inappropriate and sacrilegious response.
The parting of Duffy and Mrs. Sinico is characterized by the most
intensive and emotionally fraught wandering in the story, not over a great
geographical distance but clearly over a great emotional one. Although
they meet at a cake-shop near Phoenix Park with apparently no prior
association to their relationship, they are soon outdoors in cold autumn
weather and now wander “up and down the roads of the Park for nearly
three hours.”23 It is almost as though it will take this intensive subur-
ban wandering, a version of how Duffy has moved in much of his life, in
order to disentangle this relationship. We are told very little of what is
actually said until the decision to “break off their intercourse” has been
finalized and Duffy appears to have the last word: “every bond, he said,
is a bond to sorrow.” This is a curious statement, in a sense, given that
Duffy appears to have enjoyed no bonds prior to this one. After their
decision, they walk in silence toward the tram, and the only remaining
message is one expressed in poignant physical terms by Mrs. Sinico who
“began to tremble so violently that, fearing another collapse on her part,
he bade her goodbye quickly and left her.”24 When was her earlier col-
lapse—at the cottage, at the cake-shop, or on their walk? We are not told,
but the message is prophetic because it will not be her last collapse. What
makes this entire sequence—the moment of extraordinary intimacy in the
40 M. NORRIS
cottage, Mrs. Sinico’s loving gesture and Duffy’s negative reaction, the
week’s silence and distance followed by the break-up—so problematic is
that we are given effectively no information on the cause or root of all
this. The only explanation is that Duffy’s promising change to a posi-
tive human disposition and emotional connection has, in the end, been
sabotaged by a flare-up of his solitary nature and his insistence on “the
soul’s incurable loneliness.” Not surprisingly, Duffy returns to his “even
way of life,” and four years go by before Mrs. Sinico makes a traumatic re-
entry. He gets some new pieces of music and acquires two new books by
Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra and The Gay Science. Mozart,
Hauptmann, and Nietzsche indicate his interest in German culture, and
mark Duffy as a progressive thinker of his time. But it also indicates a
form of intellectual geographical wandering, focused abroad, rather than
here in Ireland—say, on the Irish revival—giving Duffy in this respect
some kinship with Gabriel Conroy in “The Dead.” He also begins writing
occasional sentences again, and it is now that we are given a veiled revela-
tion that may explain virtually everything in what we have learned about
Duffy’s life so far. Two months after his break-up with Mrs. Sinico, he
writes “Love between man and man is impossible because there must not
be sexual intercourse and friendship between man and woman is impos-
sible because there must be sexual intercourse.”25
This statement is a prime example of Duffy’s negative thinking, enun-
ciating what is not possible rather than what is possible, but it also opens
the hole or missing ground that has been underlying his wandering, the
absence of a “there” in his personality, his avoidance of social connection,
his refusal to affiliate with church or creed, and his inability to culminate
his friendship with Mrs. Sinico into a romance and an adulterous affair.
Duffy needs a love relationship with a man, whether he recognizes it or
not, and it is the one thing he cannot have in his life in a period that saw
the scandal, trial, and imprisonment of another Irishman, Oscar Wilde, for
the love between man and man.26 It is an absence that explains everything,
including why he may himself be unable to recognize or acknowledge
this thing about himself which is the central impossibility in his life and,
therefore, can also not be acknowledged by the narrative, except in terms
of the pervasive negativity it produces. A small detail, like his nightly din-
ing in a restaurant on George’s Street, “where he felt himself safe from
the society of Dublin’s gilded youth,”27 now makes a different kind of
sense, making him less a curmudgeon than a man in peril of temptations
that could destroy him and that must be avoided at all costs. Living alone
in a suburb, staying away from friends and family, avoiding society, makes
it less likely that the thing he himself cannot face and that makes him see
himself and talk to himself as though he were another person, will be dis-
covered by others. Church and religion, with their strictures on sexuality
and sexual desire, would only intensify his discomfort and must therefore
be avoided. Why then does Mrs. Sinico appear sufficiently safe for him to
allow himself to befriend her? She is older, has a daughter which indicates
that she is married, and she, therefore, initially offers no temptations to
him. By insisting on meeting her husband, he discourages her from think-
ing of him as a possible suitor. The solitude of their relationship clearly has
different meanings for Duffy and for Mrs. Sinico. It allows him to remain
safe from being exposed to other people and allows him to maintain his
solitary existence while giving him at least partly what he needs after all,
a friendship with someone he can fashion into a soul-mate, if not a lover.
For Mrs. Sinico, it offers the privacy that makes an affair safe and pos-
sible, and that the growing emotional closeness appears to make plausible
as well as possible. Clearly, that closeness was more constrained than she
realized, and Duffy did not “let his nature open to the full” even during
the time when “she became his confessor.”28 The other great hole that
remains in all this is, of course, the answer to the question of whether
she ever understands exactly why Duffy was not able to respond to her
advance and pursue a sexual affair with her. The absence of their final con-
versation leaves this hole in the story unresolved.
But Duffy seems safe, at any rate, even though his life continues to be
marked by losses. “He kept away from concerts lest he should meet her.
His father died; the junior partner of the bank retired.”29 This would mark
more negativity in his life, except we didn’t even realize Duffy still had a
father, since he may have seen him only at Christmas and now, when in his
traditional fashion, he escorts him to the cemetery. But except for the loss
of the concerts, his life seems no worse in the four years after leaving Mrs.
Sinico than before. The blow that makes his life a painful case, or at least
makes him see it as a painful case, comes on an ordinary evening when
he is eating his ordinary dinner in the eatery on George’s Street as he has
been doing for years, and reading the evening paper propped up on the
water pitcher before him. An article catches his eye and the first sign of
distress is that he stops eating, a move so unusual for him that the waitress
notices it. He re-reads the article “over and over,” takes a bite of cold cab-
bage only to placate her, pays his bill, sticks the paper in his coat pocket,
and walks home from Parkgate to Chapelizod with his walking stick, as he
42 M. NORRIS
does every night. When he gets home, he reads it again and we now get
its title: “Death of a Lady at Sydney Parade” with the subtitle “A Painful
Case.” The article is not a news article, giving information only, but a
human interest article—a piece of writing inimical to Duffy’s interests and
disposition, one would think. And it is curiously structured like “A Painful
Case” itself in the sense that it gives us copious details about the death
of Mrs. Sinico struck by a train, including attempts to understand why it
happened, complete with commentary from her husband and daughter.
But as with Duffy’s story, the article will have a hole in it, will have some-
thing missing because although it hints that Mrs. Sinico was troubled, it
does not say why, does not give a cause, leaves an absence at the heart of
her emotions, her soul. If Duffy was unable to explain to Mrs. Sinico why
he could not have a romantic affair with her, then in a curious way she
now delivers retribution by not explaining why— like Anna Karenina—she
throws herself under a train, or at least puts herself at risk of being struck
by one. Tolstoy’s painful ending to an adultery story is here turned into a
similarly painful ending to an un-adultery story. The retribution comes in
the form of obliging Duffy to respond to what he has just read, to make
sense of it, and to recognize and understand what it has to do with his life.
As he sits there in his room after reading the article, he first looks out his
window at the “cheerless evening landscape,” listening to a “quiet” river
flowing “beside the empty distillery.”30 The setting of his first response to
the article is the setting of absence that is, after all, his life, yet his response
will surprisingly be almost violently negative at first. “What an end! The
whole narrative of her death revolted him and it revolted him to think that
he had ever spoken to her of what he held sacred.”31 Duffy held something
in his life sacred? That alone is a surprise to us.
His first furious response is aimed at the “narrative” of the story, at the
way the newspaper article is written. “The threadbare phrases, the inane
expressions of sympathy, the cautious words of a reporter won over to con-
ceal the details of a commonplace vulgar death attacked his stomach.”32 This
viscerally negative reaction to the article actually highlights for us what is
unusual about the piece. The newspaper article could have simply reported
the facts of a train accident, but it does much more by narrating inquest tes-
timony that fills in additional information and includes expressions of sym-
pathy. Why would the paper offer a human interest article about the death of
a drunken woman crossing a train track at night? Its chief aim is patently to
exonerate the railroad by reporting that the train was going slowly, that the
porter ran to warn the woman, that an ambulance was called right away.33
The coroner’s report argues that Mrs. Sinico was not actually killed by the
train but by a heart attack from the shock. To further the argument that her
death was self-inflicted, we learn that she “had been in the habit of cross-
ing the lines late at night from platform to platform” in defiance of notices
and spring gates designed to deter just such illegal crossings.34 The reporter
then goes on to cite evidence given at the inquest by Captain Sinico and
his daughter that further exonerates the railroad and places the blame on
Mrs. Sinico herself. The husband notes that in the last two years, “his wife
began to be rather intemperate in her habits” and the daughter confirms
that “of late her mother had been in the habit of going out at night to buy
spirits.”35 The reader of the newspaper can only infer that Mrs. Sinico was
a drunk whose irresponsible behavior ended up causing inexcusable pain
to railroad workers and officials and to her family. The inquest ends with
the jury concurring with the medical evidence to exonerate the train driver
from all blame, and the “Deputy Coroner said it was a most painful case and
expressed great sympathy with Captain Sinico and his daughter.” The article
ends with the statement that “No blame attached to anyone”— except,
by implication, to Mrs. Sinico who was herself responsible for everything.
Duffy’s criticism of this article for its “inane expressions of sympathy” and
its ostensible concealment of details is almost monstrous in its irony. He
clearly thinks the article was not nearly harsh enough in blaming Mrs. Sinico
for what she did and he is willing to make up for this abuse of justice by add-
ing himself to the list of her victims and by vividly excoriating her damnable
vice. “Not merely had she degraded herself; she had degraded him. He saw
the squalid tract of her vice, miserable and malodorous.”36
Duffy’s negativity reaches extreme proportions here, more virulent
in its condemnation of Mrs. Sinico than his ire at greedy workmen
and phrasemongers in the past. In the process, he fails to notice some
discrepancies in the article that don’t quite comply with his own expe-
rience with the woman, nor with what we have learned of the story so
far. Captain Sinico claims that he and his wife had been married for
twenty-two years “and had lived happily until about two years ago”
when she began drinking.37 But the narrative earlier gave evidence that
this is not quite true, having told us that “he had dismissed his wife
so sincerely from his gallery of pleasures” that he had no objection to
her friendship with Duffy.38 This does not sound like a happy marriage
and implies further that Sinico’s absences from home and his travels
to Rotterdam are not only business trips but also visits to his “gal-
lery of pleasures.” Duffy knows perfectly well that Captain Sinico was
44 M. NORRIS
v irtually never around, and that his wife got nothing from him during
the period of their friendship. Duffy also fails to catch another detail
that jibes with his own experience, namely that the daughter “was not
at home until an hour after the accident.”39 The daughter was also
rarely home in the evenings during his time with Mrs. Sinico, and we
can construe that the poor woman was alone, night after night, for two
years before she began drinking to alleviate her unbearable loneliness.
But Duffy gets none of this until later, and can now focus only on her
disgusting vice, reminding him of “the hobbling wretches whom he
had seen carrying cans and bottles to be filled by the barman.”40 He
declares her “unfit to live” and a wreck of civilization. Remembering
her “outburst of that night”—an outburst that, incidentally, was never
reported to us—he feels that “he had no difficulty now in approving
of the course he had taken.” The “now” in the sentence opens another
little hole, however, because it suggests that at the time of the break-
up, he may indeed have had mixed feelings and wondered if he did
the right thing. The newspaper article and Duffy’s response are actu-
ally full of holes when we stop to think about it, and the biggest hole,
which neither the reporter nor Duffy bother to consider, is what Mrs.
Sinico was feeling, what immense pain and loneliness and desperation
she might have suffered for years before the night of her tragedy.
The newspaper article has effectively destroyed the last remnant of
the only human contact, the only friendship and relationship that Duffy
appears to have had in his entire adult life, and has therefore reduced his
negativity to what is almost a point zero.
But curiously, it is Mrs. Sinico herself who intervenes. “As the light
failed and his memory began to wander he thought her hand touched
his.”41 His mind may have wandered back to that moment in the cottage
when he received the only human touch we know him to have received.
Once again we see Duffy as somewhat split and of two minds, as it were,
as though his unconscious self will not let his angry and vituperative
thoughts hold sway uncontested. The touch he remembers may be not
just the sign of the romantic overture that so perturbed and offended him
but also the sign of the woman’s caring for him as no one in his adult life
appears ever to have cared for him. The memory has a powerful and dis-
turbing impact on him. “The shock which had first attacked his stomach
was now attacking his nerves.” Duffy cannot control the sensations of his
body, splitting him further, and prompting him to rise quickly, put on his
coat, and walk to a public house at Chapelizod Bridge where he orders a
hot punch. It is not clear whether the punch contains alcohol, but it may,
since we know Duffy is not a teetotaler who enjoys a bottle of lager beer
at lunch. If so, then Duffy ironically does what Mrs. Sinico did at night,
go out and walk and get himself something to drink to distract him from
pain, to calm his nerves, to try to make himself recover from his devastat-
ing thoughts. At first he experiences nothing, and although the narrative
voice describes the conversation of the half dozen workmen in the pub,
drinking their big tumblers of ale and spitting on the sawdust, Duffy looks
at them but “without seeing or hearing them.”42 He is there in the pub
but is not there, mentally and emotionally at any rate, and after the men
leave, the pub itself becomes empty and quiet with only the sound of a
tram “swishing along the lonely road outside.” And now we get what
Duffy has been thinking in the pub, namely that he has been “evoking
alternatively the two images” of Mrs. Sinico confronting him, and has
been trying to negotiate them.43 This means that the two sides of Duffy’s
persona, the censorious one and the earlier kinder one, have also been in
contest until another striking thought hits him, namely that Mrs. Sinico is
dead, “that she had ceased to exist, that she had become a memory.” Mrs.
Sinico is no longer there, materially, emotionally, spiritually, and we here
see Duffy confronting the reality of death as an absence more poignantly
than it is experienced by anyone, even Greta Conroy, in the Dubliners
story dramatically titled “The Dead.”
It is only now that Duffy will begin to connect the cause of Mrs.
Sinico’s death to his experience with her and her experience with him. He
now sees what the newspaper article concealed even as it gave evidence
for the possible cause of the actions that led to her death. “Now that she
was gone he understood how lonely her life must have been, sitting night
after night alone in that room.”44 And he now considers that he himself
played a central role in that loneliness. “He asked himself what else could
he have done” and even more painfully, “How was he to blame?” If we
recall the highly impersonal terms in which Duffy explained the break-up
to Mrs. Sinico and to himself at the time, telling her that “every bond is a
bond to sorrow” and telling himself that gender alignments with sexuality
made the relationship impossible, then this moment of introspection into
his own role and its consequences is remarkably deep. “He could not
have carried on a comedy of deception with her; he could not have lived
with her openly.”45 This was indeed the dilemma of having a woman fall
in love with a closeted homosexual and desire to have an affair with him.
What could Duffy have done? There was no solution, we are obliged to
46 M. NORRIS
acknowledge, but the way he poses the problem continues to remind us

that holes remain in the story. Did he explain to Mrs. Sinico that he could
not have a romantic relationship with a woman? Would their “comedy of
deception” have been his pretending to be straight with her, or merely
their continuing to be soul-mates without becoming actual lovers, if she
understood and accepted the situation? If so, the deception would have
been only the stealth that he tried to avoid in the first place by insisting
on meeting Captain Sinico. Living with her openly would, of course, not
have solved the problem of their intimacy either, and could have exposed
them to the scandal that the Parnell affair had made so dramatically visible
not long before. The only thing that Duffy could have done differently
was perhaps to handle the three-hour conversation before the break-up
more honestly and openly, and perhaps to find a solution that, while not
perfectly satisfactory, might nonetheless have mitigated her loneliness and
allowed her the continued satisfaction of emotional, if not romantic, inti-
macy. Perhaps it is the feeling that he failed in his role at the break-up that
drives him back to its location at the Chapelizod Park gate, where he walks
“though the bleak alleys where they had walked four years before.”46 The
scene is as negative as all the scenes of his life as we have seen them. The
trees are “gaunt,” the alleys “bleak,” the night “cold and gloomy.” The
only warmth and life that penetrates this lifeless and empty scene is the felt
presence of Mrs. Sinico. “She seemed to be near him in the darkness. At
moments he seemed to feel her voice touch his ear, her hand touch his.”47
Her felt presence stirs an outpouring of regret over his negative treatment
of her, his withholding and depriving rather than endowing and giving.
“Why had he withheld life from her? Why had he sentenced her to death?
He felt his moral nature falling to pieces.”48
When Duffy reaches the crest of Magazine hill, he looks out at the
river leading to Dublin whose lights burning “red and hospitably” convey
a warmth rare in the story. As he looks down the slope, he sees “some
figures lying” at the base of the wall. “Those venal and furtive loves filled
him with despair.”49 Are the figures men and women living at home or
in boarding houses with no private indoor space for making love? But
when we hear that Duffy “gnawed the rectitude of his life,” we also won-
der if they might be homosexual lovers, men with men or women with
women, for whom this may be the only safe place to connect even on a
cold and gloomy night. Seeing the dark figures makes him feel that “he
had been outcast from life’s feast.” And he now takes full responsibility
for Mrs. Sinico’s despair and her death. “One human being had seemed
to love him and he had denied her life and happiness: he had sentenced
her to ignominy, a death of shame.”50 As he stands there, looking down
at the lovers, he feels that they are also looking at him watching them and
wishing him gone as though he were a mere voyeur rather than a man
who has just suffered a profound epiphany. “No-one wanted him; he was
outcast from life’s feast.” Life’s feast is love, intellectual, emotional, social,
sexual, and it is true that at his moment in history there appears to have
been no way that a person of his sexual disposition, if that is what it is,
could have had the opportunity to relish life’s feast. The person who tried
voraciously to imbibe life’s feast was his fellow Irishman Oscar Wilde, who
was able to have it all for a time, to flourish professionally and socially
behind the screen of a camouflage marriage and family and still connect
with same-sex lovers until his life exploded and went up in social and legal
flames. Joyce’s 1909 essay on Wilde describes the outcome of his revel
in life’s feast after release from his two years in prison: “He was hunted
from house to house as dogs hunt a rabbit. One after another drove him
from the door, refusing him food and shelter, and at nightfall he ended up
under the windows of his brother, weeping and babbling like a child.”51
We remember now Duffy’s brief stint with the Irish Socialist Party, whose
workmen were interested mainly in income and wages—an experience
that leads him to conclude that no social revolution, perhaps of a kind that
might decriminalize homosexuality, “would be likely to strike Ireland for
some centuries.”52
For a final moment on Magazine Hill, Duffy’s world remains alive to
him as the drone of the cargo train engine below seems to him to “reiter-
ate” the syllables of Mrs. Sinico’s name.53 Then all goes silent and empty.
He can no longer hear the train, and he “could not feel her near him in
the darkness nor her voice touch his ear.”54 He waits and listens again, but
there is only silence. In a sense, he is back to where he was at the begin-
ning of the story, except that his vision of himself and his life has become
split and he now sees the hole in his life and the absences of experiences,
emotions, communion, and joy that this entails. Is Duffy worse off having
achieved this insight through his tragic friendship with Mrs. Sinico or are
his new insights a gift that enriches him, even as it enriches him with pain?
Richard Ellmann, noting the theme of death in Dubliners, observes that
Joyce’s attention to the topic may have been his “answer to his university
friends who mocked his remark that death is the most beautiful form of life
by saying that absence is the highest form of presence.”55 This sentiment
is forcefully conveyed in “A Painful Case” and it is reinforced throughout
48 M. NORRIS
by the complex handling of the scenario of space as a site of mobility, the

stylistic repetitions of words denoting absences, and the foregrounding of
what is not told, what is withheld, what is not there in the story. The wan-
dering and walking around Dublin and its environs functions as a motion
that is effectively Sisyphean with respect to Duffy’s life. We never really see
Chapelizod, the bank on Baggot Street, the eatery on George’s Street or
Earlsforth Terrace, and neither, presumably, does Duffy even as he visits
them. Only the narrative voice gives us a little specificity, the sawdust on
the floor of a pub, for example, and the reporter of the article is obliged
to detail a little of the mechanics of the train tracks of Sydney Parade. It
is not the materiality or visual effects of city and suburb but their empti-
ness, their lack of color, their quietude, that contribute sensations to the
personality they ground and sustain. Most significantly, the narrative gaps,
discrepancies, and holes find ways of foregrounding themselves in ways that
oblige the reader to question them, to try to understand their function, to
try to correct them and fill them in, but without being quite able to do so.
Duffy’s life is full of absences and he is not entirely there even in his own
personality, and yet under what is not there, there is something else, only
it is never brought to the surface, never becomes visible, never becomes
really part of him or part of the story. An obvious logic for this strategy is,
of course, the strong avoidance of sentimentality in a narrative set up to
evoke pity for its protagonists. We want to pity Mrs. Sinico for her pain,
but we don’t fully understand its dimensions, and we want to pity James
Duffy, but also don’t fully understand his. Only if we push our speculations
to their outer limits can we begin to grasp that our pity would be useless
in any case, because the story of Duffy and Mrs. Sinico is enveloped by the
larger political and social context of a world in which the most fundamental
needs, desires, emotions of human beings are governed by such powerful
social conventions and controls that they cannot even be acknowledged.
It may be this very recognition that becomes the reader’s “painful case.”
Notes
1. James Joyce, Dubliners, ed. Margot Norris (New York: W.W. Norton &
Company, 2006), 89.
2. Gertrude Stein, Everybody’s Autobiography (New York: Random House,
1937), 289.
4. Ibid., 90.
5. Ibid.
6. Ibid.
7. Ibid., 91.
8. Ibid.
9. Ibid.
10. Ibid.
11. Ibid.
12. Ibid.
13. Ibid., 92.
14. Richard Ellmann reports that Joyce took singing lessons from a composer
named Guiseppe Sinico during his time in Trieste, and that this is the
source of the name in “A Painful Case.” Richard Ellmann, James Joyce.
New and Revised Edition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983), 199.
16. Ibid.
17. Ibid.
18. Ibid., 93.
19. Ibid.
20. Ibid.
21. Ibid.
22. Ibid.
23. Ibid.
24. Ibid., 94.
25. Ibid.
26. I have previously discussed James Duffy’s probable homosexuality with
respect to its management by the narration in “Shocking the Reader in ‘A
Painful Case,’” Suspicious Readings of Joyce’s “Dubliners” (Philadelphia:
University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003), 158–171. See also, Roberta
Jackson, “The Open Closet in Dubliners: James Duffy’s Painful Case,”
James Joyce Quarterly 37, no. 1–2 (Fall 1999/Winter 2000): 83–97.
28. Ibid., 92
29. Ibid., 94.
30. Ibid., 97.
31. Ibid.
32. Ibid.
33. Joyce went to some pains to verify the accuracy of information in the news-
paper article by asking his brother Stanislaus to answer such questions as:
“Are the police at Sydney Parade of the D division? Would the city ambu-
lance be called out to Sydney Parade for an accident? Would an accident at
Sydney Parade be treated at Vincent’s Hospital?” Letter to Stanislaus Joyce
dated September 24, 1905. Selected Letters of James Joyce. Edited by Richard
Ellmann (New York: The Viking Press, 1975), 75.
50 M. NORRIS

35. Ibid.
36. Ibid., 97.
37. Ibid., 96.
38. Ibid., 92.
39. Ibid., 96.
40. Ibid., 97.
41. Ibid.
42. Ibid.
43. Ibid., 98.
44. Ibid.
45. Ibid.
46. Ibid.
47. Ibid.
48. Ibid.
49. Ibid.
50. Ibid.
51. James Joyce, The Critical Writings of James Joyce, ed. Ellsworth Mason and
Richard Ellmann (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989), 203.
53. Ibid., 98.
54. Ibid., 99.
55. Richard Ellmann, James Joyce, New and Revised Edition (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1983), 252.
Bibliography
Ellmann, Richard. James Joyce. New and Revised Edition. Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1983.
Jackson, Roberta. “The Open Closet in Dubliners: James Duffy’s Painful Case.”
James Joyce Quarterly 37, no. 1–2 (Fall 1999/Winter 2000).
Joyce, James. The Critical Writings of James Joyce. Edited by Ellsworth Mason and
Richard Ellmann. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989.
———. Dubliners. Norton Critical Edition. Edited by Margot Norris. New York:
W. W. Norton & Company, 2006.
———. Selected Letters of James Joyce. Edited by Richard Ellmann. New York:
Viking Press, 1975.
Norris, Margot. Suspicious Readings of Joyce’s “Dubliners.” Philadelphia: University
of Pennsylvania Press, 2003.
Stein, Gertrude. Everybody’s Autobiography. New York: Random House, 1937.
CHAPTER 4
A “Sensation of Freedom” and the Rejection

of Possibility in Dubliners
Jim LeBlanc
How sick, sick, sick I am of Dublin! It is the city of failure, of rancour and
of unhappiness. I long to be out of it.1
There is an interesting moment in “The Sisters.” On the morning after

hearing about the death of Father Flynn, the young boy in the story makes
his way to Flynn’s home in Great Britain Street. The house is shuttered
and a card announcing the priest’s death is pinned to a crape bouquet
affixed to the door knocker. The boy wants to go in, but he cannot sum-
mon the courage to knock and instead walks away. It is a bright, sunny
summer day, and the narrator reflects, “I found it strange that neither
I nor the day seemed in a mourning mood and I felt even annoyed at
discovering in myself a sensation of freedom as if I had been freed from
something by his death.”2 It is in this story—in its very first sentence,
in fact—that paralysis, that well-known and somewhat clichéd theme of
Joyce’s short story collection, first surfaces in the narrator’s stark declara-
tion of Flynn’s terminal prognosis: “There was no hope for him this time:
it was the third stroke.”3 The word “paralysis” itself appears a few lines
later in the boy’s quiet invocation of the term, which “sounded strangely”
J. LeBlanc (*)
Library Technical Services, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, USA
e-mail: JDL8@cornell.edu

DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-39336-0_4
52 J. LEBLANC
in his ears—“strange” like the unmournful “sensation of freedom” he

discovers in himself the day after the priest’s demise. What is interesting
about this latter experience, apart from its arising in such unexpected,
almost inappropriate circumstances, is the way in which it appears to dis-
pel the sense of hopelessness occasioned by the news of the priest’s third
stroke and consequent paralysis. The boy’s sense of being “freed from
something” introduces what can be construed, in fact, as a second major
theme in Dubliners, one that seems antithetical to the more celebrated and
pessimistic motif that readers have traditionally associated with the collec-
tion. As Father Flynn ends his life with paralysis, the boy begins his with an
awareness of his existential freedom. While the importance of the former
theme cannot be dismissed, what do we do with the latter, a seemingly
contradictory expression of personal freedom brought on by the priest’s
death as if in response to Flynn’s fatal apoplexy, and the development of
this idea throughout the text?
The critical focus on the notion of paralysis as one of the primary
thematic threads weaving through Dubliners is not surprising; Joyce him-
self announced this concept as a device informing his collection as early
as 1904 in a letter to his friend, Constantine Curran: “I call the series
Dubliners to betray the soul of that hemiplegia or paralysis which many
consider a city.”4 Two years later, however, in a letter to Grant Richards,
Joyce shines a different light on his avowed purpose in writing the stories:
“I believe that in composing my chapter of moral history in exactly the
way I have composed it I have taken the first step towards the spiritual
liberation of my country.”5 Paralysis and liberation. Joyce implies in these
two epistolary moments that the paralysis that pervades Dubliners and the
city his characters inhabit is not the apoplectic death sentence signaled in
the opening sentence of the opening story but a state of the “soul” that
is possible to overcome, even if the protagonists in his tales fail to achieve
this liberation. Moreover, Joyce seems to have placed the responsibility
for this failure, a failure to acknowledge and embrace the possibility for
existential liberation, squarely on the shoulders of its unfortunate suf-
ferers. As Brewster Ghiselin observes, “In Dubliners, the meaning and
movement [of the text] is further complicated by the thematic import of
that symbolic paralysis which Joyce himself referred to, an arrest imposed
from within, not by the ‘nets’ of external circumstance, but by a defi-
ciency of impulse and power.”6 The “nets” to which Ghiselin refers are,
of course, the nets of “nationality, language, [and] religion,” flung at
the Irish soul at birth to hold it back from flight, past which Stephen
A “SENSATION OF FREEDOM” 53
Dedalus famously declares he intends to fly at the end of A Portrait of the

Artist as a Young Man.7 Later in that same text, we read Cranly’s para-
phrased recollection of one of Stephen’s avowed aims: “To discover the
mode of life or art whereby [his] spirit could express itself in unfettered
freedom.”8 Joyce, then, through the mind of this semi-autobiographical
figure in Portrait, himself points out a path by which a Dubliner (at least
one with literary aspirations) can escape the paralysis that haunts Joyce’s
short stories, the “arrest imposed from within,” by taking steps, bold
ones if necessary, to transcend the “nets of external circumstance.” As
we shall see, however, it is through a repeated denial of this possibility
of personal redemption, a denial of the sensation of freedom that the
young boy discovers in himself upon the death of his friend and mentor
in “The Sisters,” that several of the characters in Dubliners develop that
“deficiency of impulse and power” that condemns them to the spiritual
paralysis from which they suffer.
Before taking a closer look at how this morbid psychological condi-
tion manifests itself repeatedly and somewhat progressively throughout
Dubliners—and, in particular, in the two tales of adult life on which this
essay concentrates—I should say a few introductory words about the for-
mal notion of existential freedom on which I’ll be drawing. In Being and
Nothingness, Jean-Paul Sartre develops a phenomenological model for
being and human existence in which existential freedom, as a fundamental
attribute of consciousness or “being-for-itself,” plays a crucial role. For
Sartre, freedom is that aspect of consciousness that originates in the rup-
ture between being-in-itself, the brute existence of the contingent world,
and being-for-itself, the being of human consciousness which “nihilates”
being-in-itself through the introduction of nothingness (non-being) into
the undifferentiated totality of existence. There is a void, or lack, at the
heart of consciousness that gives rise to desire and with it the freedom to
act on that desire.
In Sartre’s words: “Freedom is precisely the nothingness which is made-
to-be at the heart of human reality and which forces this reality to make itself
instead of to be [in-itself].”9 We are not existentially inert like tables or stones;
rather, we consciously project ourselves toward our possibilities, aiming to
become ourselves through these possibilities, choosing ourselves as some-
thing beyond brute, immutable being and acting to modify the world, not
only by arranging means in view of an end but by our very presence in the
world as free consciousness. Further, writes Sartre: “I am condemned to be
free. This means that no limits to my freedom can be found except freedom
54 J. LEBLANC
itself or, if you prefer, that we are not free to cease being free.”10 Thus, Sartre’s
existentialism places all responsibility on the individual, at least insofar as sub-
jects must choose the attitudes with which to face their circumstances, even
if the reality of those circumstances is beyond their control. “What is peculiar
to human reality,” writes Sartre, “is that it is without excuse.”11
What happens if we read Dubliners, a text that examines the apparent
spiritual paralysis of its protagonists as an “arrest imposed from within,”
through the lens of this Sartrean concept of freedom? If, existentially speak-
ing, this paralysis represents a denial of the ontological freedom to which we
are condemned and the consequent rejection of those possibilities that we
could very well pursue, what is the precise nature of the hemiplegic bad faith
of Dublin’s citizens which Joyce seeks to expose in his series of stories?
As noted above, the origin of this tension in Dubliners can be traced
back to its opening story. The spoken word, “paralysis,” which the boy
intones softly to himself, sounded to him “like the name of some maleficent
and sinful being. It filled me with fear, and yet I longed to be nearer to it
and to look upon its deadly work.”12 The boy has opened a psychological
distance between himself and a fearsome, “maleficent and sinful” otherness,
as revealed to him by the very name of this threatening being. As we learn,
this is not the only psychological distancing between himself and others that
the boy initiates. He detests old Cotter, whom he regards as a “tiresome
old red-nosed imbecile” and resents the old man treating him like a child.13
Further, there is no indication in the story that the boy holds his aunt and
uncle in much higher esteem. It is Father Flynn who seems to have played
the role of the most influential adult figure at this stage in the boy’s life,
that other who is most likely to have provided the framework for the boy’s
current sense of self and, by extension, both the guideposts and obstacles
to the boy’s realization of his existential freedom. With the sudden death of
the priest, the boy is turned loose from this dynamic, momentarily set free
from the scrutiny of at least one of those others who impose the greatest fac-
tual limits on his being-as-consciousness. This realization prompts a vaguely
“annoying” sense of freedom, a moment of clarity, with which comes the
discomforting awareness of the responsibility of having to choose himself.
This is an important insight, however, for someone whom the very sound of
the word “paralysis” fills with fear. As Sartre explains: “I escape fear by the
very fact that I am placing myself on a plane where my own possibilities are
substituted for the transcendent probabilities where human activity has no
place.”14 Thus, it is the world as possibility and, in a sense, as a pathway to
spiritual liberation that the boy momentarily intuits.
The stories that follow “The Sisters” in Joyce’s collection depict an

increasing disregard for, or at least a growing apathy toward, this sensation
of freedom, as well as his characters’ repeated denial of their own possibili-
ties through a refusal to acknowledge the scope of their existential respon-
sibility for themselves. As Sartre reminds us, “my freedom to choose … is
not to be confused with my freedom to obtain.”15 In Dubliners, Joyce’s
protagonists seem all too willing to accept their failures and to see their
situations as hopeless, even though they are completely responsible for
those situations and the attitudes they adopt toward them. This thematic
thread is not consistently woven throughout every story, but it reveals
itself often enough to be reckoned with. In the second and third stories
of childhood, especially, the boy’s sensation of having been “freed from
something” manifests itself in an urge to escape those strictures that seem
to imprison him—in both cases, the weary tedium of school and home
life—through adventure (in “An Encounter”) and idealized romance (in
“Araby”). In a remark that is particularly important in the light of Joyce’s
declared aims in writing Dubliners, the boy in “An Encounter” reflects
that “real adventures … do not happen to people who remain at home:
they must be sought abroad.”16 What the boy discovers, however, is that
danger also awaits those who roam beyond the confines of the prescribed
norms of everyday life, in flight from the “maleficent and sinful” threat of
that paralysis of spirit “imposed from within,” even if one only escapes as
far as Ringsend. In “Araby,” the boy is drawn to the East, not only by his
idealized romantic attraction to Mangan’s sister, but also by the very name
of the bazaar, the very syllables of which “called to me through the silence
in which my soul luxuriated and cast an Eastern enchantment over me.”17
In this story’s climactic epiphany, the boy glimpses the vain truth of his
escapist vision in a moment of “anguish and anger.”18
It is, however, in “Eveline,” the fourth tale in the collection, that the
self-imposed rejection of the possibility of escape from Dublin—in both
its geographic and spiritual sense—is most dramatically embraced by one
of Joyce’s leading characters. It is a story that illustrates exceptionally well
the notion of paralysis as an attempt to abdicate the burden of existential
freedom. Joyce’s protagonist, now female and a young adult, has a choice
to make: remain at home with her abusive father and thus honor a promise
to her delirious and dying mother “to keep the home together” as long
as she can,19 or run off to the virtually unknown world of Buenos Aires
with a sailor (a “real adventure,” indeed). At first it seems that Eveline
will act on her own “sensation of freedom” by choosing to escape from
56 J. LEBLANC
her dreary circumstances in Dublin: “She stood up in a sudden impulse of

terror. Escape! She must escape! Frank would save her. He would give her
life, perhaps love, too.”20 After the narrative pause in the story, though,
Eveline finds herself confused and anguished on the brink of departing
with her lover, and “out of a maze of distress, she prayed to God to direct
her, to show her what was her duty.”21 The die is already cast, however.
Eveline has changed her mind and will remain in Dublin, for there is no
“duty” associated with her furtive flight with Frank. Nonetheless, she is
keenly aware that there is absolutely nothing, existentially, that prevents
her from boarding the ship. She is condemned to choose, free to become
the woman who stays unhappily at home (or, alternatively, remains at
home but takes action to modify the circumstances of her life there) or
the woman who escapes that particular drudgery in search of fulfillment
elsewhere. She is paralyzed with indecision as she clings to the iron railing
on the boat dock, nausea arising in her body, all the seas of the world tum-
bling about her heart and “amidst the seas” (and like the boy in “Araby”),
“she sent a cry of anguish!”22 Sartre remarks that in anguish, “I apprehend
myself as totally free and at the same time as not being able to derive
the meaning of the world except as coming from myself.”23 This “sensa-
tion of freedom,” as initially experienced by the pre-adolescent boy in
“The Sisters,” has become a source of acute distress for the young adult
Dubliner. It is up to Eveline to give meaning to her world, to take a stab
at defining who she is in relation to others. She must make a choice; duty
is no obstacle, and Eveline knows it.
As the series continues, these early rejections of possible means to attain
spiritual liberation seem no longer to be in question. In the remaining
stories, limits to personal freedom are usually self-imposed or intention-
ally unchallenged, and Joyce’s characters repeatedly attribute responsibil-
ity for these existential obstacles to others or to the world itself, as if they
themselves are not free to try to modify their circumstances. This “arrest
imposed from within” pervades the stories of adulthood in the collection,
two of which I will now examine in some detail to demonstrate more
specifically how this mechanism operates in Joyce’s portrayal of the “city
of failure, of rancour and of unhappiness.”24
“It is in relation to my dream of seeing New York that it is absurd and
distressing for me to live in Mont-de-Marsan.”25 So remarks Sartre in his
examination of what we might term the “contingency of place,” one of sev-
eral aspects of being-in-the-world (like our past, our consciousness of oth-
ers, and our death) that constitute factual limits on our existential options
in any given situation—contingencies that we cannot change, but which

we are condemned to deal with. These contingent, factual aspects of reality
(facticités, as Sartre calls them) pose significant obstacles on the pathways
we choose in navigating both our everyday and longer-term situations. The
mid-twentieth-century bourgeois or bourgeoise who wishes to go to New York
is realistically limited by the fact that he or she was born, raised, and still lives
in a small city in rural southern France, as are the turn-of-the-twentieth-cen-
tury Irish who wish to escape Dublin, the city in which they find themselves
thrown into existence. Both can decide to leave their respective homes, of
course, but that departure, if freely chosen, pre-supposes a somewhat radi-
cal transformation of their fundamental existential horizons. To leave, they
must choose to be someone who refuses to remain completely Mont-de-
Marsannais, someone who refuses to remain an inhabitant of Dublin. If,
on the other hand, they opt to stay at home and persevere in their aim to
be who they wish to be in their settled residence, they must make certain
trade-offs. Again in the words of Sartre: “As for the real importance of my
project to go to New York, it is I alone who decides it: it can be simply a way
of choosing myself as discontented in Mont-de-Marsan.”26
Tommy Chandler is certainly discontented with his life in Dublin. His
job at the King’s Inns consists chiefly of “tiresome writing.”27 As for more
creative enterprises, Chandler bemoans his apparent inability to write
poetry, an act which he imagines as a possible way out of his current con-
fines: “If he could only write a book and get it published, that might open
the way for him.”28 He resents his dull life at home, feels overburdened
by the responsibilities of fatherhood and unappreciated by his wife, Annie.
Perhaps most notably, he feels small: “He was called Little Chandler
because, though he was but slightly under the average stature, he gave one
the idea of being a little man”29—a “little mannie,” a “lambabaun,” in the
words that his wife uses to calm their crying son.30 He is slightly effemi-
nate and childlike in appearance, and he knows it. This self-awareness on
Chandler’s part is important, and I’ll return to it in a moment.
Chandler’s meeting with Gallaher is a promising event, though
one which turns out to be both exciting and troubling. For Chandler,
Gallaher represents someone who has “got on,” someone who has flown
past Dublin’s nets to reach the “great city [of] London,”31 someone who
has thrown off the shackles of his native city as existential limitation,
and has overcome the Dubliners’ contingency of place. Gallaher has a
job with the London press—a different, more exotic, if not necessarily
better situation than Chandler’s. Gallaher has no wife and no children,
58 J. LEBLANC
thus, his head is still unencumbered by the proverbial sack that the two
old friends discuss at Corless’s. Says Gallaher: “I’m going to have my
fling first and see a bit of life before I put my head in the sack—if I ever
do,”32 to which Chandler resentfully responds, “Some day you will …
You’ll put your head in the sack … like everyone else if you can find the
girl.”33 Gallaher has money in his pocket and little or no moral rectitude
to weigh him down—at least in Chandler’s eyes. Yet Little Chandler
does see through Gallaher’s boastful arrogance, albeit in brief glimpses.
He senses that Gallaher is not the epitome of the successful Irish escapee
that he makes himself out to be and feels “somewhat disillusioned” by
Gallaher’s “accent and way of expressing himself”: “There was some-
thing vulgar in his friend.”34 As a model for Chandler, Gallaher is indeed
problematic. Nonetheless, the fact that his friend has managed to uproot
himself from Dublin and land on his feet in London, not to mention
having seen Paris in the bargain, is sufficient to promote Gallaher as a
kind of avatar of freedom for Joyce’s protagonist. For Little Chandler,
the great cities of London and Paris represent the promised land, the
open space beyond the imaginary enclosure that is colonial Dublin, the
place in which Chandler fears himself a “prisoner for life.”35
What really prevents Chandler from leaving Dublin, or from writing
poetry, for that matter? To view the problem from a different perspective,
what prevents Tommy Chandler from transcending the factual limits of his
existence as Dubliner, from aiming to become that person he would really
like to be—a poet, perhaps, or at least a guy who can free his head from
the sack in which he believes he has stuck it? As in many of the tales in
Dubliners, it is not so much the external circumstances of the protagonist’s
life that lead to his existential dilemma, as it is his freely chosen attitude
toward these circumstances, his melancholy, his rancor, his unhappiness.
In “A Little Cloud,” it is shame which lies at the root of Chandler’s sense
of futility and his fear of having become a “prisoner for life” of his family
and job. Dublin, as place, is just an excuse.
Chandler’s sense of shame is chronic and manifests itself in several
instances in Joyce’s tale. “A trifle made him blush at any time,”36 we are
told as Chandler orders the last round of drinks for himself and his friend
at Corless’s. Earlier, Chandler blushed readily at Gallaher’s having heard
that he had “tasted the joys of connubial bliss,”37 and again in reaction
to his friend’s question: “Any youngsters?”38 Most revealing, perhaps,
is the stress Chandler endures on first entering Corless’s. As if playing
his game of striding alone down Dublin’s darkest, tawdriest, most sordid
streets at night, Little Chandler pauses before the door of the restaurant
in fear and indecision, before summoning the courage to step inside. “The
bar seemed to him to be full of people and he felt that the people were
observing him curiously. He glanced quickly to right and left (frowning
slightly to make his errand appear serious), but when his sight cleared a
little he saw that nobody had turned to look at him.”39 Indeed, Chandler
is obsessed with the gaze of the Other, and this relentless sense of being
watched and of having to measure up in some way to the expectations of
others fuels his persistent awareness of being small.
While it is not explicitly clear to what extent Little Chandler has
embraced the petiteness that others seem to have bestowed upon him (in
spite of the fact that, as we are told, “he was but slightly under the aver-
age stature”),40 his concern over his size is hammered home, implicitly,
through the story’s narration in which the word “little” occurs more than
forty times.41
Chandler sees himself primarily as an object in the eyes of others—and a
small, inconsequential object to boot. This sense of inferiority, this sense of
self as reduced to objectness, is the source of his shame. He is sometimes
tempted, for instance, to read poetry aloud to his wife, but “shyness had
always held him back.”42 And although he believes that Gallaher is “his
inferior in birth and education,” Chandler’s “unfortunate timidity” stands
in the way of his making something “better of himself.”43 Sartre maintains
that: “the inferiority complex can arise only if it is founded on a free appre-
hension of our being-for-others.”44 Little Chandler has swallowed the bait
of this psychodynamic hook, line, and sinker. His continual recognition of
the Other as the subject through whom he acquires his objectness in the
world, manifested through his compulsive sense of shame, is a powerful
and authentic insight. His friend, Gallaher, has no shame. Where Chandler
falters is in relinquishing his freedom as subject into the service of his
being-for-others, in freely aiming to become what others make of him—
that is, in choosing to become “little.” Moreover, he accords too much
reality to other contingencies that seem to limit his options. Early in the
story, we read: “He felt how useless it was to struggle against fortune, this
being the burden of wisdom which the ages had bequeathed to him.”45
Chandler has embraced what John Gordon calls a “philosophy of drift,”46
like an insubstantial cloud borne on the winds of circumstance.
Thus, it is not so much Dublin that imprisons Joyce’s protagonist
as it is aspects of Chandler’s own temperament—attitudes he has freely
chosen. Not that Chandler doesn’t really want to see London and Paris,
60 J. LEBLANC
but as things stand, London and Paris are merely landmarks for him,
conveniently difficult-to-attain goals for his misdirected desire. His
belief that: “There was no doubt about it: if you wanted to succeed you
had to go away. You could do nothing in Dublin”47 is a cop-out. Our
place limits our successes only insofar as we choose projects that must
be realized elsewhere.
All may not be lost for Tommy Chandler, however. We know he is will-
ing to confront his apprehension, to court the “causes of his fear,” includ-
ing his timidity beneath the gaze of the Other. “Sometimes … [he] chose
the darkest and narrowest streets and, as he walked boldly forward, the
silence that was spread about his footsteps troubled him, the wandering
silent figures troubled him; and at times the sound of low fugitive laughter
made him tremble like a leaf.”48 He is also unafraid to turn on Gallaher,
in spite of his friend’s overbearing regard. We read that he “had slightly
emphasised the tone and he was aware that he had betrayed himself; but,
though the colour had heightened in his cheek, he did not flinch from his
friend’s gaze.”49 In the end, though, when confronted by his screaming
child and unsympathetic wife, “Little Chandler felt his cheeks suffused
with shame and he stood back out of the lamplight. He listened while the
paroxysm of the child’s sobbing grew less and less; and tears of remorse
started to his eyes.”50 Like the boy in “Araby” and the young woman
in “Eveline,” Chandler experiences a “sensation of freedom” in anguish,
having traded, as Earl Ingersoll remarks, “the possibility of empowerment
through travel for the warm embrace of melancholy and victimization.”51
Chandler’s crisis is nonetheless a moment of enlightenment. Arguing that
the character’s tears spring from a sudden understanding of his own ethi-
cal aberrance and his failure as a husband and father, Warren Beck main-
tains that at the tale’s conclusion Chandler realizes the extent to which
he, himself, is responsible for his situation. Although Little Chandler “has
not measurably increased his stature,” Beck writes, “he has had a further
and clearer look than from the Grattan Bridge and has heard other voices
besides Gallaher’s.”52 In either case, it is clearly Chandler’s own rejection
of the full scope of his possibilities (to write poetry, to leave Dublin with or
without his family, to remain in Dublin and accept his circumstances) that
imposes, to a great extent, the existential obstacles from which he suffers.
It is only in relation to his belief that one can only succeed elsewhere that
Chandler chooses himself as a failure in Dublin.
Sartre maintains that “whatever our being may be, it is a choice; and it is up
to us to choose ourselves as ‘great’ or ‘noble’ or ‘base’ and ‘humiliated.’”53 Just
as Little Chandler freely adopts shame as the primary attitude with which to
inform his being-for-others—an existential dynamic in which he apprehends
and prioritizes his role as object in interpersonal relations, while disclaiming
the free subjectivity he brings to these relations as well—the protagonist in
“Counterparts” chooses anger, fueled by drink, as the fundamental attitude
with which to inform his being-for-others. Like Chandler, Farrington is dis-
contented with his life in Dublin. Also like Chandler, Farrington has a job
that consists chiefly of “tiresome writing.” Unlike Chandler, Farrington resists
more aggressively even that being-for-others that others have bestowed upon
him. “The man” (as he is called throughout the first part of the narrative) fails
to get work done, tries to cover up what he does not do, and what he does
he often does badly. When confronted by his boss, he can “hardly restrain
his fist from descending upon the head of the manikin before him.”54 Given
Farrington’s propensity for drink and his general incompetence, it is unlikely
that he masks these petty rebellious desires very well. Farrington seemingly
cannot do as he’s told, but as we shall see, it is not because he lacks the capac-
ity to transcend his situation by embracing it as his own or because he cannot
simply walk away from his job. Nor is it because he frequently experiences an
overwhelming urge to use his fists.
Farrington’s apparent entrapment by contingent economic, political,
and social circumstances is reinforced thematically in the very nature of
his employment. As John V. Hagopian has pointed out: “the scrivener has
almost assumed an archetypal significance in modern literature as a mean-
ingless man, an insignificant victim of the brute forces of society or the
universe.”55 It does seem that Farrington has little control over the envi-
ronment in which he lives. Nor does he seem to have much control over
his own actions. We read: “[a] spasm of rage gripped his throat,”56 “[a]ll
the indignities of his life enraged him,”57 and “his fury nearly choked
him.”58 It is as if rage possesses him, takes him over like some demonic
other, a force beyond his mastery. Even his well-timed witticism, his back
answer to Alleyne’s foolishly posed question, “[d]o you think me an utter
fool?” seems to come from a mouth with a mind of its own: “his tongue
had found a felicitous moment.”59 In a way, Farrington appears unrespon-
sible for his own behavior. But surely we cannot let “the man” off this
easily. He is not, in fact, welded in a cell of British colonialism, economic
oppression, marriage and fatherhood, and Crosbie & Alleyne—though a
prisoner of these circumstances he may be. To what extent does Farrington
control his own destiny? In what ways can we hold him accountable for
his actions?
62 J. LEBLANC
Sartre tells us, “If we have precisely chosen humiliation as the very stuff
of our being, we shall realize ourselves as humiliated, embittered, inferior.”60
Although he is a man prone to excuses, Farrington does catch an occasional
glimpse of his own complicity in defining the terms of his demeaning situa-
tion. As he departs from his office at the close of the day, we read that: “He
had been obliged to offer an abject apology to Mr. Alleyne for his imperti-
nence, but he knew what a hornet’s nest the office would be for him …. He
felt savage and thirsty and revengeful, annoyed with himself and with every-
one else. Mr. Alleyne would never give him an hour’s rest; his life would be
a hell for him. He had made a proper fool of himself this time. Could he
not keep his tongue in his cheek?”61 That is, to be sure, the fundamental
question. If Sartre is right and we do choose our mode of being within a
given situation, the primary manifestation of this being, this human reality
that is “mine,” is the attitude with which I choose to face my circumstances.
When he fails to play his role of persecuted victim well enough (which is
quite frequently), Farrington’s attitude of choice is anger. He reacts with
barely suppressed rage to his first dressing down from Alleyne, in which his
boss chides him for not finishing the copy of the Bodley/Kirwan contract
on time and for his excessive lunch break: “The man stared fixedly at the
polished skull which directed the affairs of Crosbie & Alleyne, gauging its
fragility.”62 Farrington’s rage surges once again when he realizes that he
cannot finish his copy before the end of the day: “Blast it! He couldn’t fin-
ish it in time. He longed to execrate aloud, to bring his fist down on some-
thing violently. He was so enraged that he wrote Bernard Bernard instead
of Bernard Bodley and had to begin again on a clean sheet.”63 Even in the
pub, where Farrington is a better performer, at least when he has money
in his pocket, the man’s sense of self-respect and individual responsibility
is precarious. When he loses the first round of arm wrestling to the young
Weathers, he retorts angrily: “—you’re not to put the weight of your body
behind it. Play fair.”64 After losing the second round, he snaps fiercely at the
barman, and his drinking mate O’Halloran observes a “violent expression
on Farrington’s face.”65 Farrington seems unable to assert himself effectively
in regard to much of anything. He seems to lose at all the games he chooses
to play. The only people he can beat are his young son and, on occasion,
his wife Ada “who bullied [him] when he was sober and was bullied by
him when he was drunk.”66 Farrington lives the inferiority he has assumed
through anger and bitterness. But as Sartre maintains, “whatever our being
may be, it is a choice.” What are Farrington’s options for escaping his exis-
tential confinement?
First of all, there is drink, an attempt at liberation to which Farrington

devotes an extraordinary amount of time and energy. He is, in fact, an
alcoholic, and his brief, but frequent flights from the circumstances of
his day-to-day existence are pathological rather than authentically deter-
mined. Farrington has reached a state of advanced automatism as a result
of his chronic inebriation.67 This is one way of explaining his apparent loss
of control over his tongue, though we must not gloss over the fact that
he does choose to drink, even if he does not consciously choose to run
his mouth. In the end, Farrington escapes nothing through drink and pub
crawling, for the freedom of intoxication and the bar scene is fleeting and
ultimately illusory. Farrington’s abuse of his family represents another bad
faith attempt to transcend his situation. In fact, this abhorrent behavior
may be the most pointless and pitiful action Farrington undertakes. As
Garry Leonard has written of Farrington’s beating his son, “This is the
most pathetic defeat of all during his miserable day because slaves who
imitate the brutality of their masters have given up the search for their
own autonomy.”68 Thus, there is no transcendent existential revolution
to be found in this instance of drunken child abuse. Farrington is, in fact,
just digging his hole deeper, for at the end of the day he is not merely a
put-upon clerk, scorned flirt (recall the English woman who rejects his
admittedly weak overtures in Mulligan’s), and ignominiously defeated
arm wrestler; he’s a cowardly father as well.
He could, of course, come to terms with the circumstances that others
seem to impose on him in a free resignation to the requirements of hold-
ing a straight job (like Tommy Chandler), a commitment to proletarian
excellence in which one accepts the humiliation of working for others in a
kind of freely chosen masochism. The reward is the weekly paycheck and
the respectability of the good slave. Such a prisoner makes a conscious
decision not to escape his circumstances, but rather to make the best of his
or her situation in the light of the contingent factors (facticités) which help
to define it. Such a freely chosen acceptance of one’s condition is a way
out, a means by which to neutralize the adversity of would-be obstacles
to one’s self-realization, for it is “freedom itself that creates the obstacles
from which we suffer.”69
Perhaps a more satisfying, even “great” or “noble,” project would be
one of revolt or flight. Farrington does rebel, after a fashion. His unwill-
ingness to play by the rules at Crosbie & Alleyne (e.g., take his extended
lunch break) and his back answer to Alleyne reflect a kind of fighting
back. But as Edward Brandabur justly maintains, the man merely shows
64 J. LEBLANC
“brief and ineffectual rebelliousness which only serves to ensure … a more

effective paralysis at the end … an even more depressing awareness of [his]
inferiority.”70 Farrington could dedicate himself more authentically to the
cause of his and his country’s freedom by actively striving to improve his
lot, his working conditions, and the political situation. Such a commit-
ment would require more control of his behavior and would obviate the
need for drink, which in turn might improve home life for himself and his
family. Whether this rededication of self entailed small-time change or full-
scale political revolution would not matter, since if consciously willed and
carried out, it would still constitute a (re-)making of self through a free
commitment to action. He could, of course, take things even further and
simply kill Alleyne, although the eventual outcome of choosing this path
to personal liberation is likely to be unacceptably counterproductive, even
for someone as angry as Farrington. “The man” can and must choose to
face his condition as a free consciousness. He does, however, have a choice
of attitude. He can accept his circumstances and stifle, even transcend
his wrath; he can allow his “emotional nature” to explode in “spell[s] of
riot,”71 thus constituting his being-for-others in rage; or he can seek a
more rewarding existential path. As Sartre writes, “We shall not say that
a prisoner is always free to go out of prison, which would be absurd, nor
that he is always free to long for release, which would be an irrelevant tru-
ism, but that he is always free to try to escape (or get himself liberated);
that is, whatever his condition may be, he can project his escape and learn
the value of his project by undertaking some action.”72
These are not, of course, the only stories in Dubliners in which Joyce
stages the tension between the putative paralysis that grips the inhabitants
of his native city and the possible steps toward existential liberation that
its citizens reject, suppress, or simply deny. They are, however, sufficiently
representative, I hope, to illustrate the dialectic between paralysis and
liberation that Joyce sought to enact. The writer’s own resolution of this
tension, as far as his own life was concerned, was of course to seek “adven-
tures” abroad, to “escape” the nets of his native city (and country), and
“to go away.” This was not the only cure for the “hemiplegia or paralysis”
of Joyce’s Dublin, but an effective one, at least in the writer’s case. Those
Dubliners whom Joyce left behind, from his perspective at least, resigned
themselves to bemoan and wallow in their social, political, and religious
circumstances. They refused to struggle effectively against, aim to tran-
scend, or try to escape from the conditions that seemed to confine and
paralyze them. But as we know from the young boy’s first inkling of his
existential freedom in “The Sisters,” his discovery in himself of that “sen-

sation of freedom,” the possibilities for Dubliners to leave, revolt against,
or otherwise modify (or even authentically accept) their circumstances are
foreclosed only by an “arrest from within.” It is this refusal of freedom,
characteristic of Joyce’s short stories, which makes them ripe for analy-
sis through the use of Sartrean existential phenomenological principles,
which stress freedom over fate and spiritual liberation over paralysis.
Notes
1. James Joyce to Nora Barnacle, Dublin, August 22, 1909, in Letters of James
Joyce. Vol. 2, ed. Richard Ellmann (New York: Viking Press, 1966), 239.
2. James Joyce, Dubliners, ed. Robert Scholes (New York: Viking Press
1967), 12.
3. Ibid., 9.
4. James Joyce to Constantine Curran, Dublin, N. D., in Letters of James
Joyce. Vol. 1, ed. Stuart Gilbert (New York: Viking Press, 1966), 55.
5. Ibid., 62–63.
6. Brewster Ghiselin, “The Unity of ‘Dubliners.’” In Twentieth Century
Interpretations of “Dubliners”: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Peter
K. Garrett (Englewood Cliffs, NJ.: Prentice-Hall), 59.
7. James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, ed. Richard Ellmann
(New York: Viking Press, 1964), 203.
8. Ibid., 246.
9. Jean-Paul Sartre, L’Etre et le néant: essai d’ontologie phénoménologique
(Paris: Gallimard, 1943), 495. All translations are my own.
10. Ibid., 494.
11. Ibid., 613.
13. Ibid., 11.
14. Sartre, L’Etre et le néant, 66.
15. Ibid., 562.
17. Ibid., 32.
18. Ibid., 35.
19. Ibid., 40.
20. Ibid.
21. Ibid.
22. Ibid., 41.
66 J. LEBLANC

26. Ibid., 552.
28. Ibid., 83.
29. Ibid., 70.
30. Ibid., 85.
31. Ibid., 70.
32. Ibid., 81.
33. Ibid.
34. Ibid., 77.
35. Ibid., 84.
36. Ibid., 80.
37. Ibid., 78.
38. Ibid., 79.
39. Ibid., 74.
40. Ibid., 70.
41. Tim Conley, “Sophoclean Cloudbusting in ‘Dubliners.’” Notes and Queries
245, no. 3 (2000): 339.
43. Ibid., 80.
46. John Gordon, “‘A Little Cloud’ as a Little Cloud.” In New Perspectives on
“Dubliners,” ed. Mary Power and Ulrich Schneider (Amsterdam: Rodopi,
1997), 169.
48. Ibid., 72.
49. Ibid., 81.
50. Ibid., 84.
51. Earl G. Ingersoll, Engendered Trope in Joyce’s “Dubliners” (Carbondale:
Southern Illinois University Press 1996), 125.
52. Warren Beck, Joyce’s “Dubliners”: Substance, Vision, and Art (Durham,
N.C.: Duke University Press, 1969), 184.
55. John V. Hagopian, “The Epiphany in Joyce’s ‘Counterparts.’” Studies in
Short Fiction 1, no. 4 (1964), 272.
57. Ibid., 90.
58. Ibid., 97.
59. Ibid., 91.

62. Ibid., 87.
63. Ibid., 90.
64. Ibid., 96.
65. Ibid.
66. Ibid., 97.
67. Vike Martina Plock, Joyce, Medicine, and Modernity (Gainesville: University
Press of Florida, 2010,) 38; John Gordon, Physiology and the Literary
Imagination, Romantic to Modern (Gainesville: University Press of Florida,
2003), 165.
68. Garry M. Leonard, Reading “Dubliners” Again: A Lacanian Perspective
(Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1993), 182.
70. Edward Brandabur, A Scrupulous Meanness: A Study of Joyce’s Early Work
(Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1971), 83.
Bibliography
Beck, Warren. Joyce’s “Dubliners”: Substance, Vision, and Art. Durham, N.C.:
Duke University Press, 1969.
Brandabur, Edward. A Scrupulous Meanness: A Study of Joyce’s Early Work. Urbana:
University of Illinois Press, 1971.
Conley, Tim. “Sophoclean Cloudbusting in ‘Dubliners.’” Notes and Queries 245,
no. 3: 339–340.
Ghiselin, Brewster. “The Unity of ‘Dubliners.’” Twentieth Century Interpretations
of “Dubliners”: A Collection of Critical Essays, edited by Peter K. Garrett,
57–85. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1968.
Gordon, John. “‘A Little Cloud’ as a Little Cloud.” New Perspectives on “Dubliners,”
edited by Mary Power and Ulrich Schneider, 167–180. Amsterdam: Rodopi,
1997.
Gordon, John. Physiology and the Literary Imagination, Romantic to Modern.
Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2003.
Hagopian, John V. “The Epiphany in Joyce’s ‘Counterparts.’ ” Studies in Short
Fiction 1, no. 4 (1964): 272–276.
Ingersoll, Earl G. Engendered Trope in Joyce’s “Dubliners.” Carbondale: Southern
Illinois University Press, 1996.
Joyce, James. Dubliners. Edited by Robert Scholes. New York: Viking Press, 1967.
———. Letters of James Joyce. Vol. 1. Edited by Stuart Gilbert. New York: Viking
Press, 1966.
68 J. LEBLANC
———. Letters of James Joyce. Vol. 2. Edited by Richard Ellmann. New York:
Viking Press, 1966.
———. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Edited by Richard Ellmann. New
York: Viking Press, 1964.
Leonard, Garry M. Reading “Dubliners” Again: A Lacanian Perspective. Syracuse,
NY: Syracuse University Press, 1993.
Plock, Vike Martina. Joyce, Medicine, and Modernity. Gainesville: University Press
of Florida, 2010.
Sartre, Jean-Paul. L’Etre et le néant: essai d’ontologie phénoménologique. Paris:
Gallimard, 1943.
CHAPTER 5
“Scudding in Towards Dublin”: Joyce

Studies and the Online Mapping
Dubliners Project
Jasmine Mulliken
If it is true that, as Clive Hart argues, Ulysses “cannot be adequately

understood” without at least a basic awareness of Dublin’s topography,
or as he puts it, an “attention to sticks and stones,” the same must cer-
tainly be the case for Dubliners, a book whose title implies a people’s
identity can hinge on geographic location.1 Named after the inhabitants
of the city’s streets, pubs, and houses, Dubliners might even be read like
a map in which the city’s lines, corners, tramways, and railways become
infused by the oscillating inertia and momentum of its characters. Indeed,
even more than Ulysses, which has generated several scholarly topographi-
cal studies as well as commercial travel guides, Dubliners puts forth a
narrative map of “the fair city,” using place and movement as signifiers
for the economic, political, social, and psychological status of the sto-
ries’ characters. Such a map, while providing a visual manifestation of
the sometimes paralytic states of these characters, perhaps more strongly
depicts a landscape bustling with the dynamic mobility natural to a city
on the brink of revolution.
J. Mulliken (*)
Stanford University Press, Stanford University Libraries, Palo Alto, CA, USA
e-mail: jasmine.mulliken@stanford.edu

DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-39336-0_5
70 J. MULLIKEN
One of the more recent complaints heard among the Joyce community is
that over the course of the twentieth century, scholarship turned away from
the realist and naturalist qualities of Joyce’s work and focused instead on his
genius and symbolism as a kind of transcendent universalism. Joseph Kelly
identifies T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound as the original perpetrators of Joyce’s
universalist mythos, describing the Joyce they enshrined as “an avant-garde,
cosmopolitan writer” and “a writer disengaged with politics and wholly
unconcerned with the effect of his fiction on readers.”2 Such a consecration
of the artist is as limiting to the impact of his work as is the acceptance of
the idea that Joyce was only putting forward an image of the city he saw as
“the centre of paralysis.”3 As we know, Joyce revised this lens of “scrupu-
lous meanness” by the time he finished the last story. Consequently, any
overarching views of Joyce’s work actually only diminish its effectiveness
within its own historical-political contexts, argues Kelly. Joyce’s intended
readership for Dubliners was not a universal audience, as the Joyce indus-
try has tended to assume over the past century. When Joyce was writing
the stories, for example, he likely did not envisage the eighteen-year-old
elementary-education major squinting over a thousand-page anthology
containing “Eveline.” Neither was he aiming to sketch out for the professor
and scholar of modernist literature a precise blueprint of Dublin’s alleys,
parks, and pubs. As Kelly contends, “Joyce believed his main audience was
the Dublin middle class.”4 As such, they would have been familiar with the
streets Joyce referenced and also the historical-political implications of those
references. Similarly, Desmond Harding suggests
Dubliners is all the more effective as a naturalistic biography of a city because

it was designed to reflect the lives of an otherwise indifferent public. Indeed
it was these same people, Joyce believed, who were willing to pay for the
corrupt vision the collection ably supplies. In keeping with the naturalist
aesthetics, therefore, Joyce’s poetically degraded vision of Dublin actively
confronts urban crisis, engaging with the themes of moral and social entropy
common to naturalist literature.5
Both naturalist and realist interpretations require an understanding of

historic and geographic signifiers. Andrew Gibson, for example, who
characterizes 1904–1906 Dublin as a period of “deflation,”6 points out
that just before and during the time Joyce wrote most of his stories,
at least one local newspaper, the United Irishman, “was complaining
of paralysis, supineness, the inertia into which it thought the energies
of the turn of the century had foundered,” and he points to what the
“SCUDDING IN TOWARDS DUBLIN” 71
paper identified as a “spiritless[ness of the] middle classes.”7 But just as

overarching apolitical readings of Joyce are now being challenged, so too
should be any definitively paralytic characterization of Joyce’s contem-
porary middle-class readers. In fact, as criticism turns again to realist and
naturalist interpretive models, we must dispense with long-held assump-
tions and deploy a new set of tools for apprehending the significance
of realistic details that are now a century removed from our own reali-
ties. For even though Joyce was writing for his contemporaries, there
is no denying that his current readers represent a much more diverse
audience, one that does indeed span the globe and hail from places like
Buenos Aires, Canada, Persia, and Australia, all places he referenced in
his otherwise very locally focused text.
For a twenty-first-century non-Dubliner, in fact for a reader who has
never even visited Dublin, the detailed routes and approximately two hun-
dred place references can easily overwhelm an understanding of some of
the nuances of Joyce’s work. Because of the spatial and temporal distance
between late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Dublin and the
book’s current global readership, it has become more crucial than ever to
emphasize and examine those once common-place, common-knowledge
references. Fortunately, this necessity arises at a time when digital technol-
ogy offers us the means to explore more fully than ever, through visual-
textual interfaces, those historical and geographical references that might
otherwise be dismissed as inaccessible or, even worse, irrelevant.
To address the widening distance between Joyce’s original audience
and his current reader, and to exploit the vast potential of digital technol-
ogy, the online Mapping Dubliners Project (http://mulliken.okstate.edu/
dubliners) was developed to provide readers an interactive map of each
referenced location and represented route in Dubliners. Started in 2010 as
a public stand-alone Google map, the project has evolved into not just a
cartographic reference, but also a study of the cultural and political impli-
cations of Joyce’s use of place in that collection he famously referred to as
a “nicely polished looking-glass” for his Dublin contemporaries.8 When
we view Dubliners on a modern-day map, however, it becomes more than
a looking glass. Indeed, “[f]ar from holding up a simple mirror of nature
that is true or false,” argues cartographer J.B. Harley, “maps redescribe
the world—like any other document—in terms of relations of power and
of cultural practices, preferences, and priorities.”9 So while Joyce’s nar-
rative allowed Dubliners to see themselves, for better or for worse, his
implied map of the Dublin he knew allows readers today to understand
72 J. MULLIKEN
Fig. 5.1 Screenshot of the Mapping Dubliners Project homepage
the complex history of place that made those Dubliners who they were.
As a freely accessible digital tool, the Mapping Dubliners Project explores,
and encourages others to explore, the geospatial elements of the collection
and how the visual nature of the cartographic medium might inspire new
historical readings of this hundred-year-old realist text.
Currently, the Mapping Dubliners Project features two versions of a map
as well as a blog (see Fig. 5.1). Both maps strive for objectivity, as they are
intended for use by a range of students and scholars with varying critical
focuses. The blog, on the other hand, serves as a space to explore each geo-
graphical reference and route in more depth. Its purpose is to illustrate how
the map and each of its tagged locations can add to an understanding of the
text’s examination of those “relations of power and of cultural practices, pref-
erences, and priorities” that Harley identifies as key in the meaning-making
potential of maps. Both maps and the blog were created to assist students
and scholars in their research of the Dubliners’ stories. Some features will be
more helpful to students than scholars, while others have the potential to
expand the critical conversation of Joyce studies in the digital age.
Fig. 5.2 Screenshot of the Google map version, showing the list pane on the left
and the map pane on the right. Map data from GeoBasis, Google
Both maps feature essentially the same information. The interface

includes two panes: on the left, a list of places, and on the right, a map
containing tags indicating the position of each of the locations (see Fig.
5.2). The locations are listed in the order in which they appear in the text.
Naturally, then, places are grouped together by story in the list. This view
makes it easy to observe how many geographical references each story
contains, as each place is bulleted by a tag whose appearance distinguishes
it as one of a set corresponding to one story. For example, each of the
six places in “The Sisters” is marked by a blue tag, and each of the six
places in “An Encounter” is marked by a red tag. Additionally, since “An
Encounter” contains a route, the line depicting that route is red. Clicking
the place in the list toggles the corresponding tag or line on the map to
display a pop-up containing a phrase of context for the reference and the
line of text in which the reference appears (see Fig. 5.3). Alternatively, the
pop-up can be toggled by clicking on the tag or line within the map, rather
than the name of the place or route within the list.
In cases where a place is referenced in multiple stories, that place appears
once in each story’s list. For example, London appears in the list six times,
74 J. MULLIKEN
Fig. 5.3 Screenshot of pop-up containing the place name, the story in which the
reference appears, a brief description of context, and the passage from the text
where the place is referenced. Map data from Google
once in each of the groupings corresponding to the six individual stories

that mention London. Consequently, multiple tags appear in that place
on the map. Though perhaps visually redundant, the six tags on the map
call attention to the place’s special significance within multiple contexts.
And it is this type of phenomenon that makes the map especially useful for
identifying patterns and correlations between stories.
As a tool, the identifying feature of the first map, the Google map,
is accessibility. As part of Google’s online map database, it is accessible
on the web without any special software, other than a web browser and
an internet connection. It is most useful as a basic reference for readers
interested in locating an unfamiliar place or visualizing from an aerial per-
spective a character’s path as a line or shape. The ease of access and simple
navigation of the list panel is especially useful for students whose main
line of inquiry will simply be to identify the location of a reference. In this

version of the map, all the place tags are visible and cannot be hidden. The
result is a striking confluence of tags, especially in the Dublin city center,
that, while admittedly overwhelming, nonetheless conveys the impressive
ubiquity of geographical reference in the text.
The second map, the Google Earth map, offers increased interactivity,
including the ability to show and hide locations. It requires the user to
install and run the free Google Earth software, which is available online.
The display layout of this map is similar to the web-based interface, but it
allows the user to customize the view and gather more data on the places
and routes than is possible with the web version. Places can be shown or
hidden, making it possible, for instance, to view only the childhood stories
or only one or two stories’ references, or only routes and none of the loca-
tions. This customization of view makes it easy to compare the geography
of two or more stories. It also allows for a cleaner map that shows only the
points or lines the user wants to see. One drawback to this customization
is that a user might miss occurrences of a reference because she has hid-
den certain stories from the map. In other words, if a user is viewing only
the public life stories, she will see that London appears in “A Mother,”
“Grace,” and “The Dead,” but not that it also appears in “The Boarding
House,” “A Little Cloud,” and “Counterparts.” Thus, the Google Earth
version facilitates a more story-based geospatial analysis that falls short of
a true re-imagining of the text as a holistic spatial field. Nevertheless, this
version of the map offers more data, including the length of routes as well
as the elevation of any location or point on a route. Such quantitative data
allows for the calculation of travel time and opens up conversations about
the various possible routes a character may have followed. Additionally,
the map’s “play tour” feature animates the routes three-dimensionally,
so that the user can virtually fly along the path of a character through
the streets of Dublin, a simulation that highlights the distances characters
travel and emphasizes the dynamic motion and movement present in so
many of the stories.
Since the maps use current satellite imagery and the interface design
is primarily controlled by Google, what the user sees is not always exactly
what one of Joyce’s Dubliners would have seen. It is dotted with Google’s
choice of featured hotels and restaurants, labeled with Google’s preference
of English over Irish street names, and crisscrossed by modern highway
numbers. While the project has plans for a historical version of the map
that employs a non-proprietary interface, there are at least two advantages
76 J. MULLIKEN
to the Google format. First, it foregrounds changes that have ultimately

removed Joyce’s Dublin from our own modern perception of the city; and
second, it invites collaboration and augmentation among even the least
tech savvy scholars, teachers, and students of Joyce’s work.
Ultimately, the map, even with its anachronistic imagery, represents the
spatial and temporal relationships between places and invites the reader
to engage the geographical references as signifying historical and political
emphasis and undertones. There is, in fact, much to be considered by the
results of projecting Joyce’s references onto a modern map. One of the
first geographical references in Dubliners, in fact, is one that cannot be
found on a modern map. Great Britain Street’s name was changed after
the death of Charles Stewart Parnell to commemorate the Nationalist icon
and to disavow British authority in an area of Dublin where Parnell and
other Nationalists actively campaigned. Parnell held his first public meet-
ing and made his last public speech at the Rotunda Ballroom in Rutland
Square (now Parnell Square) at the intersection of Great Britain Street and
Sackville Street. The decades leading up to Irish independence necessarily
saw plenty of action in the square due to its proximity, for example, to the
General Post Office, which figures so prominently in the Easter Rising.
Many streets and landmarks changed after independence, several of them
located in the immediate area of the square. The square itself became
Parnell Square; part of the gardens became the Gardens of Remembrance,
commemorating those who died in pursuit of Irish independence; Great
Britain Street became Parnell Street, where a statue of the iconic figure
stands; and Sackville Street, named for Lionel Sackville, the first Duke of
Dorset, was renamed O’Connell Street, after Daniel O’Connell.
St. George’s Church is another notable example. Though it never
changed names, its history before and since Joyce referenced it in “The
Boarding House” illustrates the ongoing economic and religious struggles
Dublin has faced since the church was built in the nineteenth century. As
a structure and a dwelling, St. George’s has historically been perhaps as
shaky as any religious doctrine the characters of “The Boarding House”
might espouse. According to a 2009 Irish Times article, “[e]ven while St
George’s was a church, the building was put to other uses and once had
a bonded warehouse in the vaults in the cellar, which the congregation
found somewhat hard to stomach.”10 The church was built between 1802
and 1814, and since then has undergone many changes. According to
the same article, “the church became well known for an addition [sic] 22
years after it was built when that wide roof began to splay further than it
should, due to the strain of the wide-span timber trusses. Civil engineer
Robert Mallet, whose father ran an iron foundry, created cast-iron trusses
to haul the church back into shape. Mallet knew about rocky foundations,
being also an expert on earthquakes: he is credited with creating the word
‘seismology.’”11
Since Joyce’s day, the church has been a nightclub, a theater, and an
office building. In June of 2014, a large banner covered the top of the
portico advertising “To Let: Spectacular offices in a unique setting.”
While anachronism and proprietary distractions pose certain limitations
to the maps, the potential they open up for new or enhanced interpreta-
tions of Dubliners is significant. Equally significant are the conversations
the anachronistic elements initiate about the differences and similarities
between Joyce’s world and our own. All of these elements can be explored
by a community of users who can suggest edits to the public map or, in
the future, even edit the map directly. The Google Earth maps can be
downloaded and edited by a literature class as part of a course project, for
example. Thus, unlike, say “Walking Ulysses,” an excellent non-proprietary
academic mapping project out of Boston College, the Google interface
that the Mapping Dubliners Project utilizes, despite its problems, encour-
ages collaboration and interactivity.
Eric Bulson explores the function and relevance of literary maps in
Novels, Maps, Modernity, where he argues “[l]iterary maps give readers
something that novels do not: an image, a structure, a way to visual-
ize form and narrative design.”12 Taking Bulson’s description further, I
would argue that what literary maps essentially do is reorganize the text.
They remediate the narrative and place it in a visual context. Whereas the
nature of text is linear, placing that text into the cartographic medium
stretches that line into a plane. No longer is the text sequential; rather it
gains a simultaneity that allows the reader to more readily observe con-
nections. While this type of visualization is certainly effective for novels,
the simultaneity the map offers is especially effective in analyzing multiple
texts, such as the stories of Dubliners. Instead of reading each narrative
as a sequence of events, the map presents them all at once, which is actu-
ally a more natural way to apprehend the actions of the book. Dubliners
presents a set, not a sequence, of situations. It is a network at the same
time that it is a narrative, and like any network, it benefits from visual rep-
resentation or rendering. What emerges from this particular visualization
of Dubliners is a multitude of patterned and unpatterned phenomena that
are worth exploring alongside and in addition to existing interpretations
78 J. MULLIKEN
of the text. Furthermore, the simultaneity of action perceptible in the

cartographic rendering reveals the overlap of movement between stories,
projecting an almost animated interplay of characters, events, and places
that go unnoticed when taking the stories in one by one.
Perhaps the most compelling feature of the map is the visual represen-
tation of the routes traversed in many of the stories. Of the fifteen sto-
ries in Dubliners, eight contain discernable paths, further illustrating the
emphasis on dynamic movement and mobility. These paths are traversed
by foot, boat, train, tram, cab, and car. Thanks to the map data, we can
easily ascertain that the distances traveled range from approximately 0.96
miles (1.55 kilometers) in “A Little Cloud” to 7.11 miles (11.4 kilome-
ters) in “After the Race.” Both the distance of the routes and the chosen
methods of transportation to cover these distances are highlighted by the
remediation of the text to the map interface. The emphasis the map places
on the routes challenges the assumption that all of the characters are in
some way paralyzed and raises more important political, historical, and
realistic questions like: Just how long does it take two boys walking at a
leisurely pace to get from north Dublin to Ringsend? How long will it
take them to get home by train? How long does it take to get from North
Richmond Street to Araby? If the boy doesn’t arrive at the bazaar until
“ten minutes to ten,”13 will the trains still be running to take him home?
When would trains have stopped running? Are the train schedules also an
issue for Gabriel and Gretta in “The Dead?” If it’s so easy for the young
men of “After the Race” to take a train from the city center to Kingstown
(now Dun Laoghaire), why isn’t a train ride home to Monkstown, a stop
on the same line, an option for Gabriel and Gretta? Is their decision to stay
at the Gresham truly a way to avoid getting sick from a cab ride along the
coast, as Gabriel insists? Or is the night at the upscale hotel evidence of
Gabriel’s premeditated plan to rekindle romance with his wife?
Equally fascinating is what the map reveals about the shape of certain
routes. None of the paths start and end in the same place. Though some
circle and overlap themselves, most of them begin in one area of Dublin
and end somewhere completely different and distant. Such indisputable
movement from point A to point B challenges the ideas of paralysis so
assumedly central to the collection even while the often grim destinations
reinforce a sense of inertia or immobility. The lines of some of these routes,
while indicating motion, often reflect frustrated circles or confused, inef-
ficient doubling-back.
Fig. 5.4 Illustration of

a gnomon
One consistently interesting critical focus that has been explored in

Dubliners is the gnomon introduced at the beginning of “The Sisters.”
As the narrator gazes at the dying priest’s window, he ruminates on three
words: gnomon, simony, and paralysis. The word gnomon, which “sounded
strangely in [his] ears,”14 refers to a geometrical figure, specifically a paral-
lelogram with a parallelogram removed from one of its corners (see Fig.
5.4). More broadly, gnomon may refer to “that which, added or subtracted,
enlarges or diminishes a figure without changing its form.”15
In one article, David Weir examines the connection between narrative
structure and gnomon, following to an extent Kenner’s Uncle Charles
Principle. But whereas Kenner looks specifically at idiom, Weir looks at
larger narrative patterns. One example Weir addresses is Eveline’s idi-
omatic third-person passive voice in the line “[t]heir passage had been
booked” and in the omission of any description of her journey to the
Wall.16 Weir argues that to fill in this absence, which he identifies as a nar-
rative gnomon, would be to undercut her paralysis. If we knew her actions
we might see her as more functional, more independent, and possessing
more agency over her situation.
We also see this type of narrative gnomon at work in the childhood
stories. Each of these stories begins at the narrator’s home and ends at a
place charged with strange and uncomfortable elements of maturity. The
boy in “The Sisters” sits in an apartment containing the dead body of a
problematized priest; the narrator of “An Encounter” calls desperately for
his friend after hearing a troubling soliloquy from a masturbating ped-
erast; and the young boy in “Araby” despairs in his vanity as he gazes
upward in a darkened bazaar named after the exotic east, but realized, as
Earl G. Ingersoll argues, as “the East of English power.”17
What is missing in each narrative is, appropriately, a return home, a
closing of the shape of the boys’ routes. Such a lack of return, which
parallels an advancement toward maturity, suggests not so much a lack
of closure but a strength of momentum and forward movement. This
absence of a return is most clearly suggested and even visible on the map
80 J. MULLIKEN
Fig. 5.5 An approxima-

tion of the “Encounter”
route. The solid line is the
route the boys take, and
the dotted line is the
implied route home via
train
in “An Encounter” (see Fig. 5.5). Beginning in the vicinity of Gardiner

Street, the narrator of “An Encounter” takes a northeasterly route to the
Canal Bridge. When Mahoney arrives at the bridge, the two boys continue
northeast to Wharf Road where they turn right at the Vitriol Works. They
take the Wharf Road, which turns sharply to the right as it approaches the
area of the docks, all the way to the ships and then cross the river on the
ferry. They spend a little time after they disembark watching the sailors
and then wander slightly southeast into Ringsend. The story ends with
the boys abandoning the idea of visiting the Pigeon House and instead
deciding to take a train home. The implied route home closes up the par-
allelogramatic shape of the route. This route on the map, with its absent
closing line, is a visual gnomon to match the narrative gnomon apparent
in the missing but implied homeward journey.
A visual gnomon is also suggested in “Araby,” though it perhaps
emerges only in the context of previous criticism. In Epic Geography,
Michael Seidel explores the directional and geographical correlations
between Homer’s Odyssey and Joyce’s Ulysses.18 Seidel notes that Joyce’s
earlier works include similar Odyssean characteristics and points out that
Joyce’s original name for Dubliners was “Ulysses in Dublin.” Much like
the paths of the characters in Ulysses, argues Seidel, the routes in the child-
hood stories of Dubliners adhere to a northwest-southeast trajectory, mir-
roring the path of Odysseus from Calypso’s island home to Ithaca. In
the case of “Araby” we might derive a gnomon from the line connecting
the narrator’s point of origin, North Richmond Street, and his destina-
tion, the bazaar. The diagonal line would connect the top left and bottom
right (or northwest and southeast) corners of an imagined parallelogram
(see Fig. 5.6). But what forms the southeast corner is just a stand-in for
an exotic east invoked by the name “Araby.” This non-specific eastern
Fig. 5.6 A geographic

gnomon represented by
North Richmond Street
in the northwest, the
exotic east in the south-
east, and Araby (the
bazaar) in between
destination extends that diagonal line to a further southeasterly point,

across the space of the removed parallelogram of the gnomon. Like Weir’s
description of the narrative gnomon in “Eveline,” the visual gnomons in
“An Encounter” and “Araby” reaffirm simultaneously a paralysis as well as
an open-ended potential journey that may or may not be readily apparent
in the text itself.
“Eveline,” like “The Sisters,” offers fewer specific local references than
the rest of the stories, but those the story does make are, again, quite sug-
gestive. Only “After the Race” references more international places than
“Eveline,” a story lacking an identifiable route and describing a young
woman’s immobility and paralysis. “Eveline” contains eight references to
six places outside Ireland, while “After the Race,” with its diverse cast
of almost futuristically mobile multi-national characters, refers to seven
non-Irish locales. However, despite Eveline’s inability to leave Dublin, the
scope of the places mentioned in her story is by far the most expansive in
the collection and includes locations from Australia and North and South
America. To visualize on a map the nearly microscopic pinpoint represent-
ing the North Wall, one of the very few local references, against the sheer
area of the story’s geographic scope is to face the tremendous tightness
of Eveline’s world. Furthermore, to see the map grow larger and more
expansive with each foreign reference is to feel Eveline’s panic as not only
immobilizing but, indeed, constricting.
“After the Race,” while referencing several countries, also covers a sig-
nificant stretch of the Dublin metropolitan area. The energetic crew of
young men move from west to east through the city, “scudding in towards
Dublin”19 on Naas Road and covering approximately 10.5 miles (17 kilo-
meters) through the night via car, foot, cab, train, and rowboat before
settling in for some merriment on the American’s yacht in the Kingstown
Harbour just past Monkstown where Gabriel and Gretta live. The young
82 J. MULLIKEN
men take the train to the harbor and “in a few seconds, as it seemed to
Jimmy, they were walking out of Kingstown Station.”20 Alternatively, in
“The Dead,” Gabriel and Gretta opt to stay the night in a hotel in Dublin
rather than risk Gretta catching another cold on the long cab ride home
“with the east wind blowing in.”21 The Conroys and the young men of
“After the Race” clearly have different perspectives of the trip from the
city center to the southeastern suburbs, raising questions like: Why might
the Conroys be averse to taking a tram or a train home if the trip only takes
“a few seconds?” Would the trams and trains have stopped running by the
time the party was over? Would the holiday have affected the public trans-
portation schedule? What is the significance of the ubiquity of transporta-
tion modes available to Jimmy Doyle in comparison to Freddy Mallins’s
ability to “only get one cab,”22 even though, according to Mr. Browne,
“Teddy [would] have all the cabs in Dublin out”23 with all his raucous
whistling? These questions, while conceivable with the text alone, arise
more prominently when the stories are viewed in comparison on the map.
Similar to the childhood stories, a narrative and visual gnomonic par-
allel is evident in the map of “Two Gallants” (see Fig. 5.7). While the
visual gnomons of the “Encounter” and “Araby” routes are approximated
or implied, Lenehan’s is more obvious. After walking south down Capel
Street, he turns left at City Hall. He then turns right at Great George’s
Fig. 5.7 Approximate
map of the gnomon sec-
tion of Lenehan’s route
Street, where he meets his friends and continues in that direction until
he turns left again at the Markets. The space in what would otherwise
be a near-parallelogram echoes the empty space Lenehan feels at that
same moment, because he does not have a job, a home, or a “simple-
minded girl.”24 While certainly perceivable without a map, the gnomon of
Lenehan’s existence is reiterated by the shape of his route.
The comparative dearth of geographical references—only five local
and three more outside of Ireland—in “The Boarding House” to most
of the other stories may be a reflection of Bob Doran’s entrapment in
his relationship with Polly. The local references are associated with the
family that is trapping him: Spring Gardens refers to a place connected
with Mrs. Mooney, who figures strongly in Doran’s capture; the three
streets mentioned are the one in which the boarding house is located,
the one in which Polly’s brother works, and the one where Mrs. Mooney
plans to “catch short twelve”;25 and the other local reference, the nearby
St. George’s Church, carries connotations of Doran’s recent confession
of impropriety and a foreshadowing of his pending marriage. The non-
Irish references—London, Liverpool, and the Isle of Man—are associated
with tourists and “and, occasionally, artistes from the music halls,”26 all of
whom have much more freedom of movement than Doran. In the story,
Mrs. Mooney intends to walk from her establishment in Hardwicke Street
south and east 11 minutes to the Catholic Church in Marlborough Street
for the shortest mass of the day. Although the church is never directly
named, the map indicates it could only be St. Mary’s Pro-Cathedral, the
first Catholic Church to be officially acknowledged in Great Britain since
the Protestant Reformation. Additionally, the reference to the cathedral
here and in “A Mother” bolsters both stories’ musical themes in that John
McCormack, the oft-referenced tenor in Joyce’s works, was a member of
the cathedral’s Palestrina Choir in 1904 and 1905.
St. George’s and its bells, on the other hand, located nearer than the
pro-cathedral to the boarding house, belonged to the Church of Ireland.
The juxtaposition of the two churches in such short textual and geographic
proximity invokes the tension between the religious values and doctrines
of each church. Divorce is forbidden by the Catholic Church, but Mrs.
Mooney, a Catholic, has already herself gone “to the priest and got a
separation from [her husband] with care of the children.”27 Bob Doran,
too, is confined by his association with the church in that his confession to
the priest the night before has resigned him to the imminent reparations
he must make by marrying Polly. Additionally, his job in a Catholic wine
84 J. MULLIKEN
merchant’s office is jeopardized by his sinful state, creating even more

pressure for him to atone for his sins by getting married. If either of these
characters were Protestant, not only could they more conveniently gain
or retain their independence, they would have a shorter walk to church
on Sunday. The bells pealing behind Mrs. Mooney’s anxious plotting and
Bob Doran’s regrets and self-doubt seem almost like a loud and clear
wake-up call, one that is ultimately ignored.
Both the Church of Ireland and the Catholic Church are set up against
the notion of secularism and even atheism as Bob Doran recalls his youth-
ful days when he “boasted of his free-thinking and denied the existence of
God to his companions in public-houses.”28 And Spring Gardens adds a
fourth prong to the Catholic-Protestant-Atheist trifecta already at work in
the story. Situated very near the start of the “Encounter” boys’ path, the
location is given as the nearest point of reference for where Mrs. Mooney
had set up her first business. According to John Wyse Jackson and Bernard
McGinley, “Joyce originally wrote ‘in Fairview’” rather than “in Spring
Gardens,” which would have put the shop north of the River Tolka, in
the suburban neighborhood of Fairview, which houses the oldest Jewish
cemetery in Dublin.29 The Jewish colony around Fairview had their syna-
gogue, however, down in the city center, at Marlboro Green, just off of
Marlborough Street, where Mrs. Mooney attends mass. The connection
between Fairview and Marlborough Street as references, then, becomes
quite suggestive. Mrs. Mooney, a Catholic moving from Spring Gardens to
Hardwicke Street to Marlborough Street on her path toward her Catholic
Church, is a significantly more enfranchised echo of a Jewish woman mov-
ing from Joyce’s deleted Fairview to the Marlboro Green synagogue. The
deleted reference removes the Judaic connotations from the already pres-
ent tension between the story’s bells of St. George’s, Mrs. Mooney’s plans
for attending mass, and Bob Doran’s nostalgia for his free-thinking days.
Similar to Eveline’s and Bob Doran’s immobility in opposition to the
world travelers around them, Little Chandler’s local associations are juxta-
posed with Gallaher’s international jaunts. The first geographical marker in
“A Little Cloud” is the North Wall, in a sense picking up where “Eveline”
left off. Chandler, like Eveline, watches the departure of the one person
who is able to offer an escape from Dublin. On his way to meet his well-
traveled friend, Chandler takes a route that carries him from Henrietta to
Capel Street and across Grattan Bridge to Corless’s. On the other side of
the river, the local references stop (except for one more mention of the
pub) and instead of a specific street name, which the narrator has been
generous with until this point, we get only “[h]e pursued his revery so
ardently that he passed his street and had to turn back.”30 At the south-
bound crossing of the Liffey, it seems, Chandler travels to an imaginary
version of Gallaher’s world where he can’t find his way around and where
any discussion of proper place names is strictly un-Irish. When his meeting
with Gallaher is over, and he is suddenly at home—though the journey
there is absent from the text—contemplating his poetic failings, he longs
to capture “his sensation of a few hours before on Grattan Bridge.”31 He
is stuck again in Dublin, immobilized in an address-less home with no
explicit route out or in. For a story whose earlier route is so specific, the
absence of the route home raises questions about space and locality and
the way Chandler perceives his immobility. The vague homeward route
also recalls the two childhood stories, which involve Liffey crossings and
forays into adulthood. Unlike the children, though, Chandler eventually
does arrive home, back on the North side of the river, unsuccessfully hold-
ing his own baby, reinforcing perhaps his inability to reach what he per-
ceives as maturity, whether developmental or artistic.
“Counterparts” is unique in its ubiquitous reference to pubs and spe-
cific establishments. O’Neill’s, Davy Byrne’s, the Scotch House, and
Mulligan’s are all pubs or shops appearing in the story, and reference is
also made to Terry Kelly’s pawn office and Callan’s of Fownes’s Street.
Farrington’s route is clearly discernable from the specific street and busi-
ness names. The area of the city that Farrington and his friends haunt is the
same general area where Little Chandler meets Gallaher and that Lenehan
passes through on his solitary walk in “Two Gallants.” If it weren’t for
the fact that “Two Gallants” takes place in August and “Counterparts” in
February, it might even be possible that the two friends Lenehan talks to
at the corner of Dame Street and Great George’s are Higgins and Nosey
Flynn of “Counterparts,” either on their way to Davy Byrne’s or having
already left. We could still consider the possibility, however, that a version
of Higgins and Nosey Flynn and a version of Lenehan meet at the inter-
secting of the two stories’ routes.
“Clay” is another story containing a route shape in dialogue with its
theme. Maria, whose face, in the words of Cóilín Owens, “[t]o Joyce’s car-
tographic imagination … might have resembled the west coast of Ireland,
beaten by millennia of Atlantic gales,”32 makes her reverse Odyssey north-
west from Ballsbridge to Drumcondra, stopping along the way to buy
cakes in the city center. Her journey is divided into three parts: “[f]rom
Ballsbridge to the Pillar, twenty minutes; from the Pillar to Drumcondra,
86 J. MULLIKEN
twenty minutes; and twenty minutes to buy the things.”33 Her first tram
ride takes her on an inverted version of the route Jimmy Doyle’s crew
and Farrington take, and the one Gabriel and Gretta could have taken,
between the southeast suburbs and the city center. In “After the Race,”
Doyle and his friends travel approximately four times the distance Maria
travels in twenty minutes, so even though Jimmy feels like it takes only “a
few seconds,”34 seeing Maria’s route and knowing the time it takes to cover
it, Jimmy’s perceived rapid motion is revealed as unrealistic and exagger-
ated. The way the time flies for the young men is put into perspective by
the explicitly defined relationship between time and space that Maria so
meticulously perceives. Her route from Ballsbridge to Drumcondra is a
fairly straight line with only a few bends. However, at the midpoint of that
line, Nelson’s Pillar in Sackville Street (now O’Connell Street), Maria stops
to buy cakes. She first walks east on the cross-street to Downes’s, then
crosses back over O’Connell Street to the west into Henry Street, before
returning to the pillar to catch the tram to Drumcondra. Maria’s route also
contains the shape of a cross (see Fig. 5.8), a symbol that is echoed later
by the prayer-book and prediction that she’ll “enter a convent before the
year [is] out.”35
“A Painful Case” contains suggestions of movement, but the lack of ref-
erences in relation to Mr. Duffy’s path as he walks makes it impossible to
project his route onto a map of Dublin. This marked divergence from a clear
Fig. 5.8 Approximate
map of the middle sec-
tion of Maria’s route in
“Clay”
mappable path is accentuated by the halting descriptions of his movement.

One suggested route in the story is the one Duffy takes from a restaurant
in George’s Street to his home somewhere in Chapelizod. He has just read
the report of Mrs. Sinico’s death, though the reader is as yet unaware of
what information the report contains, or even that she has died. Duffy’s trip
home starts quickly, but he slows considerably before he reaches his destina-
tion. Once he arrives home, the story of his friend’s death is revealed as he
re-reads the news in the paper. Afterward he goes back out, but this time
his movements become more fragmented. Only line segments are discern-
ible, as if the solid purposeful route-lines of the previous stories are becom-
ing dotted lines punctuated by his “stout hazel stick striking the ground
regularly” and then “less emphatically.”36 Additionally, each movement is
followed by a distinct halt. When he reaches his apartment after his first
reading of the news, he gazes out the window at “the river [that] lay quiet”
and thinks, “What an end!”37 Then he leaves home and walks through the
park, and “[w]hen he gain[s] the crest of the Magazine Hill he halt[s].”38
Then, again, he begins walking home but “halt[s] under a tree” until he can
no longer hear any movement of train or passer-by or anything at all. All
movement seems to halt with the halting of sound until “[h]e could hear
nothing: The night was perfectly silent.”39
Neither “Ivy Day in the Committee Room” nor “A Mother” contains
a moving route. And the route in “Grace” is only vaguely mappable. The
sudden cessation of clear and definitive movement in these stories begins
in “A Painful Case,” in which a woman is tragically killed by a fast-moving
train, one of the fastest vehicles of the age, and continues until the open-
ing of “Grace” when a bloodied and inebriated Tom Kernan, who has just
fallen down the stairs and badly bitten his tongue, takes a cab, a much
slower method of travel, from Grafton Street along a vaguely described
path to the Glasnevin Road. The only indication of the cab’s path is a ref-
erence to Westmoreland Street and the Ballast Office, both of which are
very near Grafton Street itself. Furthermore, the absence of clear location
or route is emphasized by the constable’s inability to get an answer to his
inquiry into Kernan’s address. He asks three times with no success. Since
Kernan is unable to speak, Mr. Power finally “giv[es] directions,” which
we aren’t privy to, to the driver.40 It isn’t until the end of “The Dead”
when finally, after a longer wait than usual, Freddy Mallins is able to hail
“only … one cab,”41 that movement becomes more precise. This time the
directions to the driver are clearer, though still incomplete:
88 J. MULLIKEN
Do you know Trinity College?

Yes, sir, said the cabman.
Well, drive bang up against Trinity College gates, said Mr Browne, and then
we’ll tell you where to go.42
The rather violent collision-implying directions sustain the implications

of bodily injury involved in Kernan’s journey home. Since only one cab
can be found, the other departing characters in “The Dead” must employ
more basic means of movement. As if the technology of transportation
methods must start over from scratch in this final story, Gabriel and Gretta
evolve from walking the first few blocks from the Morkans’s house until
they find a cab at Winetavern Street to take them the rest of the way to
the Gresham.
While the map makes visible certain data and spatial relationships, it
does not, itself, interpret that information. As Franco Moretti notes, “in
order to see [a] pattern, we must first extract it from the narrative flow,
and the only way to do so is with a map. Not, of course, that the map
is already an explanation; but at least it shows us that there is something
that needs to be explained.”43 Once the narrative is de-linearized, new struc-
tures and relationships emerge. Rather than the chronological hierarchy of
childhood-adolescence-maturity, the stories, for example, inhabit varying
spatial ranges of Dublin-Europe-world. The hierarchy of concentric spaces
that the map reveals, in one sense, supersedes that of narrative linearity, but
another component of the project, the blog, seeks to unite the map and the
narrative through critical examination of the map’s data. While it’s possible
and useful to view individual stories on the map to glean insight into each
self-contained narrative, perhaps the most interesting extrapolations come
from looking at individual places and the way they connect stories. These
extrapolations, much like those above, are explored in more detail on the
project’s blog, which is updated regularly with a new essay profiling a place.
If the map is meant to be a tool for visualizing narrative, the blog is a re-
rendering of that visualization back to a text format in an effort to interpret
the implications of de-linearization. Each essay includes the quotes from
the stories in which the reference appears, historical information about the
place, historical images, often from the National Library of Ireland’s digi-
tized photograph collections, and the possible socio-political implications of
its use as a reference in the context of the story or stories in which it appears.
Since each blog post focuses on a single place, and some places appear in
multiple stories, it is not uncommon that a single post might deal with more
than one story. Many times, in fact, these posts consider a dialectic between
stories, revealing a network grounded in geospatial relationships. Thus, the
re-rendering of the visual to the textual retains a place-centric focus that dif-
fers from the standard linear-narrative-centric focus of most literary analysis.
Dubliners scholarship has often assumed or explored network-like
relationships between the characters of different stories: Zack Bowen,
for example, outlines the “superficial connections” between Maria and
Eveline, noting that the similarities in their circumstances are made stron-
ger and more relevant by the connection the two characters share to The
Bohemian Girl.44 Just as the musical corollaries weave together charac-
ters and stories to show complex psychological dialectics, the geographic
corollaries serve as a system through which Joyce suffuses political con-
siderations. It’s rather easy to find similarities among the characters of
Dubliners, but to consider the comparisons in geographical terms is to
realize the reason for their commonalities or the nuances of their differ-
ences. More delicate strands of the Dubliners web become visible when
we consider space and geographic labels as signifiers of characters’ distinct
political views and circumstances. For example, London appears seventeen
times in six stories, linking all of them together through the evocation
of Unionist and Nationalist themes. While such themes seem obvious in
individual stories and even the work as a whole, the complexity of Joyce’s
treatment of the binary becomes more apparent when examined in the
context of each of the stories’ use of the reference. In “A Little Cloud,”
for example, London is a site of emigration, a common phenomenon
Joyce observed among “Irishmen for whom the economic and intellectual
conditions of their native land [were] unbearable.”45 In “The Boarding
House” and “A Mother,” it’s the point of origin for musicians visiting
Dublin, though their success in their trade is rather questionable when
we consider that they’re boarding at Mrs. Mooney’s establishment or per-
forming at Mr. Holohan’s initially rather scantly attended and ultimately
ill-arranged “series of four grand concerts.”46 In both cases, it would seem
these London artistes must resort to gigs in Dublin because they are no
Caruso, the Italian tenor that Bartell D’Arcy refers to as an example of a
singer who performs in places like London, Paris, or Milan. It’s unclear
why the woman with the London accent is in Mulligan’s pub, but she is
certainly too good for the likes of economically challenged Farrington,
though she teases him with a glance or two and a “brush […] against his
chair.”47 And finally, in “Grace,” London is the home base of the firm that
employs Mr. Kernan. Though his office is in Dublin, the writing on the
90 J. MULLIKEN
window includes “the name of his firm with the address—London, E.C.”48
In all of these stories, the reference to London serves as a point of context
for connotations of economic frustration and paralysis for the Dubliners,
even if these Dubliners are just visiting. Thus, though it may seem Joyce
is treating London critically, he is also constructing an impression of the
individually perpetuated economic ties that kept the Irish bound to Great
Britain. Such ambiguities can’t be perceived simply by looking at the map,
so it is on the blog that implications like these are explored.
Less complex but more focused, the blog’s Gardiner Street place profile
draws together two stories that refer to that location: “An Encounter” and
“Grace.” In both stories, the reference to Gardiner Street occurs in the
context of the Jesuit Church that both the Dillons and Kernans attend.
In much the same way that Maria is suggestive of a type of Eveline, the
Kernans represent a possible other incarnation of the Dillons. We might
imagine the two young Dillon boys of “An Encounter,” Joe and Leo,
becoming the two grown Kernan boys of “Grace,” unnamed “good
sons” who “wrote regularly and sometimes sent home money.”49 But
instead of fulfilling his “vocation for the priesthood”50 as predicted in “An
Encounter,” Joe, the older Dillon boy, ends up in his Kernan incarnation
either “in a draper’s shop in Glasgow” or as a “clerk to a tea-merchant
in Belfast.”51 In the case of the former, another strand appears connect-
ing the would-be Father Joe Dillon to the problematized Father Flynn
who dies in “an unassuming shop, registered under the vague name of
Drapery”52 in “The Sisters.”
The advantage of exploring the geographic references place by place, as
the map reveals them, rather than story by story, as they appear in the text,
is that doing so foregrounds the network Joyce embedded into his stories.
And while the blog’s place profiles examine the multiple contexts of indi-
vidual places, it’s easy for a user to navigate the posts by story, as each post
is tagged with the titles of the stories in which the place appears. Clicking
on the title of the story in the blog menu brings up a list of posts, each
one covering a place that is mentioned in that story. The digital medium,
in other words, allows the user to choose whether to explore the places by
story or explore the stories by place.
Examining the implications of the vast references and routes in the
text brings up some interesting questions: How do the shared geographic
references between stories suggest thematic parallels? What can be gleaned
from the intersection of characters’ routes? What factor does transporta-
tion play in distance traveled in each story? What is the significance of
the shape of a character’s route? Which place names have changed, and
why, since Dubliners was published? The visual cues the map provides
enhance the potential observations a reader might make about direc-
tion and “rapid motion through space.”53 And the organization of the
blog, around individual places, removes the standard linearity of text in
favor of examining the network-like qualities of the world Joyce creates
in Dubliners. This isn’t to say Joyce intended us to read his text as a map,
nor that his references are impenetrable without one. But the potential
that digital technology offers for analysis of such encyclopedic work as
Joyce’s should be embraced. That such technology is anachronistic to the
environment Joyce wrote about shouldn’t keep us from exploring the rela-
tionship between his world and our own contexts. Jacques Derrida called
Joyce’s work a “1000th generation computer.”54 This isn’t to say Joyce
could foretell the future, but his work certainly lends itself to putting our
technologies to use in mining that “embedded ore” that still lies beyond
our conventional perception.55 The Mapping Dubliners Project strives to
be an impetus for generating digital-age discussion about Joyce’s work in
the twenty-first century. It aims to promote an awareness of the cycles and
trajectories of a city’s economic and political evolution since the publica-
tion of the most famous book of fiction depicting that city and its inhabit-
ants; it re-imagines Joyce’s work within the contexts of our contemporary
culture and technological capacities; and it anticipates a vision of the digi-
tal humanities that both reveres the past and celebrates current and future
technological literary exploration.
Notes
1. Clive Hart and Ian Gunn, James Joyce’s Dublin: A Topographical Guide to
the Dublin of “Ulysses” (New York: Thames & Hudson, 2004), 9.
2. Joseph Kelly, Our Joyce: From Outcast to Icon (Austin: University of Texas
Press, 1998), 9.
3. James Joyce to Grant Richards, Trieste, May 5, 1906, in Letters of James
Joyce, ed. Richard Ellmann, Vol. 2 (New York: Viking Press, 1966), 134.
5. Desmond Harding, Writing the City: Urban Visions & Literary Modernism
(New York: Routledge, 2003), 55.
2013), 3.
7. Qtd. in Gibson, 40.
92 J. MULLIKEN
8. James Joyce to Grant Richards, Trieste, June 23, 1906, in Letters of James
Joyce, ed. Stuart Gilbert, Vol. 1 (New York: Viking Press, 1957), 64.
9. J.B. Hartley, “Texts and Contexts in the Interpretation of Early Maps,” in
The New Nature of Maps: Essays in the History of Cartography, ed. Paul
Laxton (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 2001), 35.
10. Emma Cullinan, “Landmark Dublin Church Converted to Offices,” Irish
Times. March 25, 2009.
11. Ibid.
12. Eric Bulson, Novels, Maps, Modernity: The Spatial Imagination, 1850–2000
(New York: Routledge, 2007), 3.
13. James Joyce, Dubliners (New York: Viking Press, 1967), 34.
14. Ibid., 9.
15. Qtd. in David Weir, “Gnomon Is an Island: Euclid and Bruno in Joyce’s
Narrative Practice,” James Joyce Quarterly 28.2 (1991), 348.
17. Earl G. Ingersoll, “The Psychic Geography of Joyce’s ‘Dubliners,’” New
Hibernia Review 6.4 (2002), 100.
18. Michael Seidel, Epic Geography: James Joyce’s “Ulysses” (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1976), 5–6.
20. Ibid., 47.
21. Ibid., 180.
22. Ibid., 208.
23. Ibid., 206.
24. Ibid., 58.
25. Ibid., 64.
26. Ibid., 62.
27. Ibid., 61.
28. Ibid., 66.
29. James Joyce, Dubliners, an Illustrated Edition with Annotations, ed. John
Wyse Jackson and Bernard McGinley (New York: St. Martin’s Press,
1993), 53.
31. Ibid., 84.
32. Cóilín Owens, “‘Clay’ (2): The Myth of Irish Sovereignty,” James Joyce
Quarterly 27.3 (1990): 605.
34. Ibid., 47.
35. Ibid., 105.
36. Ibid., 113.
37. Ibid., 115.
38. Ibid., 117.
39. Ibid.
40. Ibid., 153.
41. Ibid., 208.
42. Ibid., 209.
43. Franco Morretti, Graphs, Maps, Trees: Abstract Models for a Literary History
(New York: Verso, 2005), 39.
44. Zack Bowen, Musical Allusions in the Works of James Joyce: Early Poetry
through “Ulysses” (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1974), 12.
45. James Joyce, “Fenianism: The Last Fenian,” in The Critical Writings of
James Joyce, ed. Ellsworth Mason and Richard Ellmann (Ithaca: Cornell
47. Ibid., 95.
48. Ibid., 154.
49. Ibid., 156.
50. Ibid., 19.
51. Ibid., 156.
52. Ibid., 11.
53. Ibid., 44.
54. Jacques Derrida, “Two Words for Joyce,” in Post-structuralist Joyce: Essays
from the French, ed. Derek Attridge and Daniel Ferrer (Cambridge, NY:
55. James Joyce, Ulysses, ed. Hans Walter Gabler (New York: Vintage Books,
1986), 11.1006.
Bibliography
Bowen, Zack. Musical Allusions in the Works of James Joyce: Early Poetry through
“Ulysses.” Albany: State University of New York Press, 1974.
Bulson, Eric. Novels, Maps, Modernity: The Spatial Imagination, 1850–2000. New
York: Routledge, 2007.
Cullinan, Emma. “Landmark Dublin Church Converted to Offices.” Irish Times
25 March 2009. Web. 9 Sept. 2015.
Derrida, Jacques. “Two Words for Joyce.” Post-structuralist Joyce: Essays from the
French, edited by Derek Attridge and Daniel Ferrer. Cambridge, NY: Cambridge
Harding, Desmond. Writing the City: Urban Visions & Literary Modernism. New
Harley, J. B. “Texts and Contexts in the Interpretation of Early Maps.” The New
Nature of Maps: Essays in the History of Cartography, edited by Paul Laxton.
Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001.
94 J. MULLIKEN
Hart, Clive and Ian Gunn. James Joyce’s Dublin: A Topographical Guide to the
Dublin of “Ulysses.” New York: Thames & Hudson, 2004.
Ingersoll, Earl G. “The Psychic Geography of Joyce’s Dubliners.” New Hibernia
Review 6.4 (2002): 98–107.
Joyce, James. Dubliners. New York: Viking, 1967.
———. Dubliners, An Illustrated Edition with Annotations. Edited by John Wyse
Jackson and Bernard McGinley. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1993.
———. “Fenianism: The Last Fenian.” The Critical Writings of James Joyce, edited
by Ellsworth Mason and Richard Ellmann. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University
Press, 1989.
Press, 1966.
———. Letters of James Joyce. Vol. 2. Edited by Richard Ellmann. New York:
Viking Press, 1966.
———. Ulysses. Edited by Hans Walter Gabler. New York: Vintage Books, 1986.
Kelly, Joseph. Our Joyce: From Outcast to Icon. Austin, TX: University of Texas
Press, 1998.
Mapping Dubliners. http://mulliken.okstate.edu/dubliners
Morretti, Franco. Graphs, Maps, Trees: Abstract Models for a Literary History. New
York: Verso, 2005.
Owens, Cóilín. “‘Clay’ (2): The Myth of Irish Sovereignty.” James Joyce Quarterly
27.3 (1990): 603–614.
Seidel, Michael. Epic Geography: James Joyce’s “Ulysses.” Princeton: Princeton
Walking “Ulysses”: Joyce’s Dublin Today. Boston College. Web. 9 Sept. 2015.
Weir, David. “Gnomon Is an Island: Euclid and Bruno in Joyce’s Narrative
Practice.” James Joyce Quarterly 28.2 (1991): 343–360.
CHAPTER 6
Joyce’s Mirror Stages and “The Dead”
Ellen Scheible
While Gabriel Conroy’s ambiguous epiphany in “The Dead” is one of the

most debated moments in the critical legacy of Dubliners, it firmly under-
scores the conflicted relationship between cultural paralysis and national
progress in the collection. It would be difficult to argue that there is no
movement in “The Dead,” literal or figurative. Literal movement perme-
ates the story through party mingling, dancing, and storytelling. On the
other hand, we will always remember Hugh Kenner’s astute observation
that Lily, the caretaker’s daughter, cannot be “literally run off her feet”;
rather, she was figuratively exhausted.1 Hence, “The Dead” opens with
an emphasis on movement more as a figurative symbol, often betrayed by
physical failings. Of course, literal movement in the story goes nowhere—it
surfaces in formulaic dancing, the repetitive circling of Johnny, the horse,
and the reminder that the party happens every year at the same time in
exactly the same way, without change. Movement in “The Dead” is not
progress or change in its overt expression. Instead, progressive movement,
or at least the struggle to identify it, occurs inside the mental space of
its characters and is impeded, consistently, by the trappings of the body.
E. Scheible (*)
Department of English/Irish Studies, Bridgewater State University,
Bridgewater, MA, USA
e-mail: escheible@bridgew.edu

DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-39336-0_6
96 E. SCHEIBLE
From the very beginning, Gabriel Conroy thinks he’s failing with Lily but
cannot articulate it, and this trauma of self-failure compulsively repeats.
Gabriel’s body becomes a trope for both nation and home: a struggling
modern Ireland suffocated by its domestic interior. This essay is interested
in the way that the modern body, in Joyce’s writing, becomes the canvas
for the inhibited movement of progress, national and domestic, that is oth-
erwise unarticulated.
It is news to no one to say that James Joyce was fascinated with the
body, particularly with male ejaculation. In every major work, many of
his letters, and biographies of his personal life, it claims center stage, time
and again, as an intimately perfected metaphor, where the physical spill-
ing over of desire meets the excesses and intellectual boundaries of verbal
expression. The ejaculations achieved by many of Joyce’s characters pro-
duce clarity of vision, guiding characters like Gabriel Conroy to compli-
cated epiphanies, however fleeting.2 Recognitions, both of certain truths
of selfhood and larger aesthetic or political truths, such as the calling of
the artist or the making of the nation, emerge during and after the climac-
tic scenes. The pleasure of seeing a version of the self, reflected in presence
of the Other, produces the ultimate release and allows for momentary
lucidity, glimpses of truths, dreams of resolution. Yet, in “The Dead,”
one of Joyce’s most anthologized short stories, it is precisely the absence
of ejaculation that stares back, glaringly, from the hotel mirror at Gabriel
Conroy when he finally realizes that he will not be having sex with his wife
on that night in January 1904. In other words, because there is no ejacula-
tion, Gabriel does not have the kind of epiphany in “The Dead” that Joyce
offers his other characters. His double entrapment at the end of the story,
both inside the domestic interior and his own mind, becomes a represen-
tation of his sexual frustration. Pent up, blushing from the suffocation of
embarrassment, unable to release physically and verbally, Gabriel is only
able to see who he is not, rather than whom he could and should be.
Ireland’s Domestic Interior and the Female Other

“The Dead” is only one example of the metaphorical power of the
domestic interior to both reflect the tension between opposing con-
cepts and emulate the physical body in Joyce’s writing. Joyce saturates
his fiction with gendered, spatial metaphors that force us to reimagine
the comfortable binary we have historically mapped onto the geographi-
cal, public spaces and the domestic, private spaces that framed Irish life
JOYCE’S MIRROR STAGES AND “THE DEAD” 97
in the early twentieth century. As Vincent J. Cheng has asserted, Joyce

overtly connects the public and private realms, by making “direct analo-
gies between sexual and international politics; between imperial politics,
war, and sexual relationships.”3 Even outside of Joyce and Ireland, the
discursive modernities of the rising postcolonial nation-state frequently
produce nation-making and homemaking as intertwined ideologies.
For the editors of the 2006 critical collection, Our House: The
Representation of Domestic Space in Modern Culture, the parallel narra-
tives of nation and home might reflect a “dialectic” between “shelter and
identity.”4 They argue that this is evident in the history of domestic space:
The history of the house is the history of the dialectic that emerges between
these two impulses: shelter and identity, Al and Anna. As befitting his ‘hard’
masculine disciplinary status, the former connotes a science, a history, a soci-
ology and a philosophy of architecture. […] The latter, however, connotes
[…] a deep pre-occupation on the part of artists and cultural agents with
the question of dwelling and with the impact of the house upon human
experience.
In their examination of the critical history of domestic space and the

impact it has had on the categories of house and home, Smyth and Croft
underscore the gender binary of cultural development: “Thus was born
the idea of the house as something in excess of its primary function as
artificial shelter – as a place, in fact, which expressed something of the
identity of the builder or owner or occupier, as well as something of the
culture of the society in which it was built.” The overlapping categories of
home and nation can then be transposed onto the female agent as a repro-
ductive entity that births both the domestic interior and the discourse of
cultural identity. In fact, as early as the Romantic period, if not before,
cultural modernity articulated its own authenticity through the image of
woman. In The Gender of Modernity, Rita Felski points out that because
she was “located within the household” and “more closely linked to nature
through her reproductive capacity,” the female image “embodied a sphere
of atemporal authenticity seemingly untouched by the alienation and frag-
mentation of modern life.”5 In the discursive struggle to authenticate early
twentieth-century Ireland, the female body often regulates the domestic
interior of the Irish family that then produces visions of the independent
nation. We see this in the work of W.B. Yeats, Elizabeth Bowen, Joyce, and
many others. Representations of the domestic interior in the early twen-
tieth century emphasize the uncertain, yet gendered, authenticity of the
98 E. SCHEIBLE
rising Irish nation. They also symbolize the containment and entrapment
of the female body, first by the “double bind” of nationalist masculinity
that feminizes and simianizes the Irish man, as Joseph Valente has argued,
and, second, by the sexual repression of the Catholic Church.6
The use of interior space to emphasize Ireland’s historical hybridity
as a modern and traditional nation, inevitably transformed by partition,
surfaces in modern cultural images of repressive domestic interiors, such
as the Anglo-Irish Big House in The Last September or the Magdalene
asylums in the 2003 film The Magdalene Sisters. Such spaces represent the
need for the nation to control any feminized threat to the newly formed
version of Irishness that depended so heavily on an often violent and domi-
nating cultural nationalism and, by extension, a newly formed postcolonial
masculinity. Kevin Whelan claims that, “In the Irish case, as in other colo-
nial situations, ‘tradition’ and ‘custom’ were rooted in violence, instability
and discontinuity, not anterior or antecedent to modernity, but absolutely
implicated in and sustained by it.”7 As we know, Joyce’s literary version of
this quandary exposes cultural nationalism as an unsuccessful tool when
it is the only mechanism through which we imagine a cohesive national
identity. Further, Irish masculinity in Joyce becomes frustrated and per-
plexed when it is confronted with the absolutism of nationalist rhetoric
and discourse. Gabriel Conroy’s dance with Miss Ivors in “The Dead”
both confuses and annoys him, while Leopold Bloom’s standoff with the
Citizen in Ulysses is downright infuriating. However, Gabriel Conroy and
Leopold Bloom both emerge in Joyce’s writing as complicated symbols of
the paradoxical need for Irish masculinity to both confront its failure and
rewrite the nation. Such confrontation happens most often in Joyce when
male characters confront the female others of the narrative and are then
able to recognize some core aspect of themselves that leads to an alternate
national vision. In this way, female others in Joyce’s writing become sig-
nificant players in a larger critique of nationalism while also e mphasizing
the gendered relationship between home and nation, body and State.
Andrew Gibson points out that Dubliners “implies not only a critique but
an amplification, expansion, or deepening of the radical nationalist posi-
tion, at the heart of which is the very question of anatomy and diagnosis
as a question of how to see, and how to see clearly.”8 For many of Joyce’s
male characters, seeing clearly depends on the confrontation and recogni-
tion of the female gaze in an act of mirroring. Particularly in “The Dead”
Joyce poses female characters as confrontational figures in his articulation
of a refracted national image.
The Mirror and “The Dead”

Previous critics have underscored the way that female characters become
consumed by mirrors in Joyce’s texts. For instance, Kimberly J. Devlin
reads female mirror-gazing in Joyce as a form of narcissistic voyeurism,
arguing that “the duplicitous female mirror is often more figurative than
literal, a stance of self-absorption that may mask a prying voyeuristic eye
levelled at the other.”9 Moreover, Suzette Henke argues that in Ulysses
Gerty MacDowell’s repressed sexuality is “paradoxically deflated by a desire
to ‘cry nicely before the mirror.’”10 In the paradigm of woman-as-mirror,
“The Dead” is the precursory text to A Portrait and Ulysses, where Joyce
stages frustrated confrontations between a masculine Irish figure—Gabriel
Conroy—and reflective female figures—Lily, Molly Ivors, and Gretta.
However, women are not gazing into mirrors in “The Dead.” Instead,
our masculine hero, Gabriel, cannot take his eyes off of the mirror.
Further, “The Dead” is also the text that does not fit the Joycean for-
mula of self-recognition through ejaculation in the presence of a female
other—a formula that emerges distinctively in A Portrait of the Artist as
a Young Man, Ulysses, and even Finnegans Wake, as I will discuss later.
Gabriel must undergo a similar, but failed, version of the mirror stage that
Stephen Dedalus later experiences on the beach in A Portrait and that
Bloom experiences with Gerty in Ulysses: the recognition of the self as
an Other. However, Gabriel’s moments of recognition occur within two
intimate domestic spaces: his aunts’ pantry and a hotel room. Before Joyce
brings Stephen and Bloom outside to the beaches, the marginal spaces of
the nation where they meet their female counterparts and experience their
own epiphanic moments, he births Gabriel, trapped inside two interior
spaces of lagging modernity where Gabriel fails time and time again to
perform appropriately. Stephen has no trouble ejaculating his soul’s joy
when he greets his bird-girl, and Bloom does not struggle as he meets
Gerty’s erotic vision; but Gabriel never reaches that moment of expression.
While it would be reductive to focus on the historical correlations only,
we should note that Joyce gives us Gabriel’s entrapment within the Irish
domestic interior well before 1916, Stephen’s bird-girl vision is published
in 1916, and Bloom’s understanding of home rule through Gerty’s dis-
abled body appears in 1922. Gibson underscores the importance of his-
tory, particularly the Famine, in his reading of Dubliners when he argues
that even “if it suggests that nothing more illuminating than the uncom-
pleted movement towards the anamnestic moment is available—that does
100 E. SCHEIBLE
not mean that Joyce is urging the need for a radically decisive break with
the Irish past.”11 Rather, it is the production of the Irish future that is at
stake in Joyce’s writing. In the world of Joyce’s Dubliners, the nation was
still struggling to develop its identity in the face of an emasculating and
overly feminized domestic interior.
That struggle is marked in Dubliners by the currency of desire. In
Jacques Lacan’s classic framework, the alienating reflection that charac-
terizes the mirror stage underscores a desire for recognition that both
complicates and furthers the process of identity creation. Lacanian desire
is never satisfied; meaning that the existence and purpose of desire in the
human psyche is to reproduce itself, make itself plural and duplicitous.12
Vicki Mahaffey and Jill Shashaty emphasize this point in their introduc-
tion to Collaborative Dubliners. After identifying Dubliners as a collection
of stories that “resemble parables in content as well as in structure,”13
Mahaffey and Shashaty claim that “despite the great age of the parable
genre and its appearance across cultures, its central subject matter is argu-
ably the frustration of desire.”14 The insatiability of desire in Dubliners has
the power to expose the inequalities and struggles that plague daily life for
its characters. As Mahaffey and Shashaty conclude:
Ideally, readerly frustration inspires a combination of curiosity and dialogue

that will illuminate the mechanisms of oppression the story contains. This
process can unveil the inner workings of both social oppression and psychic
submission, and in some cases by shedding light on this destructive relation-
ship, can help a reader derail it.
While Mahaffey and Shashaty are emphasizing both internal and external
levels of unsatisfied desire—the characters’ and the readers’—I am most
interested here in the unsatisfied desire internal to the narrative. More spe-
cifically, I want to argue that from the first moment that Gabriel Conroy
walks into the Morkans’s holiday party in “The Dead,” he is confronted
by the imminent promise that his desire will be unaddressed, misunder-
stood, and finally unfulfilled. He undergoes a series of mirror stages that
reflect his disunified, alienated cultural position and the stifled desire that
accompanies it. Through the insatiability of Gabriel’s desire, Joyce shows
us what modern Ireland, and any modern nation, needs most: to recog-
nize its inherent disunity, accept its inability to reconcile modernity with
the past, and embrace a national hybridity that engages female otherness
(both colonial and internal) as its most precious tool in the quest to estab-
lish nationhood.
As Gabriel grapples all night with ways to address not only his d inner
audience but also his après-dinner companions, he immediately fix-
ates on Lily, the caretaker’s daughter, and tries to win her over early in
the night. Interestingly, the definition of the word “lily” in the Oxford
English Dictionary informs their encounter. Hidden a few pages down
in the many definitions is a modernist gem: beyond whiteness, purity, or
beauty, “lily” also means “a term of abuse, especially of a man, to imply
lack of masculinity.”15 Every man who enters the domestic interior of the
Morkan sisters is greeted by Lily’s fair but emasculating presence. Lily
greets more than one “gentleman” and welcomes them into the domestic
interior of the “pantry.”16 She helps one man “off with his overcoat” and
then has “to scamper” to the next man.17 The male Dubliners that must
cross the threshold to even appear in our story are exposed and reflected in
the cracked looking-glass that is our servant, Lily, as she scampers among
them and brings them into the domestic space of the pantry, the hub of
future consumption. The men must face a feminine other, and perhaps
their frustrated sexual desire if they want to attend the party. Their meal
ticket is their confrontation with Lily.
Luke Gibbons, Marjorie Howes, and others have addressed various
aspects of Lily’s role as servant in “The Dead.”18 As a figure of emigration,
migrant work, or death, Lily is a transitional character, ironically trapped
inside the Morkans’s domestic interior. Gabriel’s role as male patriarch
and his entry into the party are only attained through a confrontation
with Lily. In fact, he reassures Aunt Kate that he is “right as the mail” so
that she may depart upstairs to the ladies’ dressing room and leave Gabriel
to his awkward conversation with Lily.19 While Cheng and others have
suggested that Joyce is eternally fascinated with the postal service, the
invocation of the homonym “male” also conjures that which is masculine
or manly. Gabriel is, in fact, never “right as the male” in this story and we
learn this not only through his infamous failure to communicate appro-
priately with Lily, but also through his many confrontations with other
women—famously Molly Ivors and Gretta, but also even less prominent
figures, such as Freddy Malins’s mother, both of his aunts, and Mary Jane,
his niece.
In the first few pages of “The Dead,” Gabriel makes two imperative
suggestions, one that fails right away and one that fails later in the story.
As we painfully remember, he suggests that Lily will soon be married,
and her response makes Gabriel blush for the first time in the narrative:
“Gabriel coloured as if he felt he had made a mistake.”20 This blush will
102 E. SCHEIBLE
be repeated again with Molly Ivors and later with Gretta. His second sug-
gestion is that he will, in fact, have sex with his wife in a hotel room at the
end of the evening, “Gretta tells me you’re not going to take a cab back to
Monkstown tonight, Gabriel, said Aunt Kate.”21 His aunts and Lily then
watch as Gabriel’s “admiring and happy eyes had been wandering from her
[Gretta’s] dress to her face and hair.” The blush on Gabriel’s face marks
the beginning of his emasculation in a text that will continue to render him
impotent when confronted by female others. In the beginning, he can only
see the frustration he feels with Lily as a sign of his failure to communicate
effectively: “He would fail with them just as he had failed with the girl in the
pantry. He had taken up a wrong tone.”22 But as Joyce shows us, Gabriel
should instead see it as his failure to listen, and further, as his failure to rec-
ognize what he does not understand: Lily’s pain at the thought of marriage
and Gretta’s memory of Michael Furey. Gabriel does not yet recognize the
alienation of desire, the isolation of loss, or the autonomous selves of oth-
ers. In psychoanalytic terms, Gabriel has not yet undergone his mirror stage.
He and his Irish masculinity are trapped in a pre-symbolic space where the
domestic interior of “The Dead” is trying, with each female contraction, to
birth a version of nation that we have not yet seen: a hybrid, multi-faceted
nation or, as Bloom suggests in Ulysses, a nation where people can live “in
the same place” or also “in different places.”23
Molly Ivors is not quite a Cyclops, but she serves as Bloom’s foil dur-
ing her dance with Gabriel in “The Dead.” She might understand that
people can live in different places and still be a part of the nation, but her
version of nationhood—one that deceptively suggests unification—sepa-
rates Ireland from itself, instead of extending Irishness beyond the borders
of the island into a modern diaspora. Miss Ivors leaves the story early,
before the climactic dinner table scene, and Joyce criticism has detailed
the many reasons—staunch nationalism, Irish Revival sympathies, empha-
sis of nation over art—why Joyce does not see in her character the future
of an Ireland that he would embrace. Yet, Joyce’s critique of Miss Ivors
and Irish nationalism is laid bare in this scene in a way that his criticism
of Gabriel is not. Gabriel, who again “coloured” at her accusation that he
writes for the Daily Express, reacts to Miss Ivors with “a look of perplexity”
and attempts to reassure himself that “It was true that he wrote a liter-
ary column every Wednesday in the Daily Express for which he was paid
fifteen shillings. But that did not make him a west Briton surely.”24 Just as
Yeats tells us in “The Second Coming” that “Surely the Second Coming
is at hand”25 forcing us to realize that the poem is precisely not about the
revelation that it portrays, Joyce shows us here that Gabriel has not even
considered how his paid writing hobby might portray him politically to
others. It seems that money is to blame.
His dance with Miss Ivors is neither the first nor the last time in “The
Dead” when Gabriel buffers his failure to understand acts of communica-
tion with either the payment or reception of money. After he embarrasses
himself with Lily, he takes “a coin rapidly from his pocket” and forces
it on Lily, “thrusting it into her hand.”26 With Miss Ivors, it is the pay-
ment of fifteen shillings that obscures Gabriel’s thoughts about writing
for a conservative newspaper—while Gabriel might want to believe that
he writes reviews because he “loved to feel the covers and turn over the
pages of newly printed books,” we learn that the “books he received for
review were almost more welcome than the paltry cheque.”27 Joyce spends
a paragraph emphasizing the irony of Gabriel’s clichéd thought that “lit-
erature was above politics,” but he wants us to notice that it will never be
above money in Gabriel’s mind. Gabriel continues to exhibit his wealth
in front of women in “The Dead.” He overpays the cabdriver in front of
Gretta (“he gave the man a shilling over his fare”28) and tells Gretta that
Freddy Malins “gave me back that sovereign I lent him.”29 Finally, he
refers to himself as a “pennyboy”30 when he realizes that Gretta has been
thinking about Michael Furey and not him. While the story is punctu-
ated by Gabriel’s blushing forehead, the references to Gabriel’s generos-
ity (“You are a very generous person, Gabriel”;31 “Generous tears filled
Gabriel’s eyes”;32 etc.) often provide a mocking critique of both Gabriel’s
embarrassment and his attempts to smooth those moments with eco-
nomic reparations. Just as his speech about Irish hospitality is horribly
misinformed by his dance with Miss Ivors, Gabriel’s generosity is a satirical
metaphor for his inability to see versions of the Other—female, working
class, nationalist—in himself. Gabriel’s suggestion that working-class folks
in the Morkan house should be more hospitable is as ironic as overpay-
ing the cabdriver, because Gabriel cannot see anything beyond his urgent
desire for Gretta. The generosity demanded by “The Dead,” a generosity
of self that must be able to empathize with the Other, is obfuscated by the
monetary generosity offered time and again by Gabriel and reflected back
to him in each failed female encounter that he has. Most importantly, this
false generosity of wealth exposes the failure of his interactions with Gretta
and illustrates the vague and contested epiphanic moment at the very end
of the story. Gabriel’s “generous tears” mark the absence of the thing he
desires most: “he had never felt like that himself towards any woman but
104 E. SCHEIBLE
he knew that such a feeling must be love.”33 Gabriel has never felt, toward
a woman, the kind of love that offers the absolute generosity of self and,
through the emphasis on female mirroring in “The Dead,” we can assume
he has never felt it directed toward himself either.
Importantly, the first time that Gabriel looks in an actual mirror, in the
drawing room of the Morkans’s home, he sees both himself and his mother.
After looking at the different artistic representations of Shakespeare and
tragedy, he wanders to the wall above the piano, sees the art work, and
then sees a picture of his mother, in front of the “pierglass” or mirror: “It
was strange that his mother had had no musical talent though aunt Kate
used to call her the brainscarrier of the Morkan family […] Her photo-
graph stood before the pierglass.”34 Gabriel has a difficult time resolving
the differences he sees between his mother and Gretta, mostly because
he identifies with his mother. Gabriel sees himself, “the brainscarrier,” in
the mirror image reflected both from the actual pierglass and the photo.
However, he also sees his mother and cannot seem to separate himself
from her in order to fully accept Gretta:
It was she who had chosen the names for her sons for she was very sensible
of the dignity of family life. […] A shadow passed over his face as he remem-
bered her sullen opposition to his marriage. Some slighting phrases she had
used still rankled in his memory. She had once spoken of Gretta as being
country cute and that was not true of Gretta at all.
While Gabriel feels “rankled” by his mother’s opposition to his marriage,

he still has no trouble defining her character or remembering her exact
words; she is “dignified,” “sensible of family life,” and calls Gretta “coun-
try cute.” But no definition of Gretta follows from Gabriel’s perspective.
All we know is that “country cute” was “not true of Gretta at all.”
Throughout “The Dead,” Gabriel fails to identify with Gretta, from his
refusal to visit the Aran Islands, to his inability to recognize her as any-
thing more than a work of art in a Robert Browning poem when he sees
her on the stairs as “distant music,” and, finally, to his misreading of her
sorrow as lust at the end of the story.35 Psychoanalysis would recognize
this as Gabriel’s inability to attain the language he needs to describe and
name his wife and his marriage, and, by default, his own alienated identity;
he is trapped in his mother’s image in that photo in the mirror, inseparable
from her and her descriptions of Gretta. This leads him to see only himself
in Gretta’s visage, not the female other that he must recognize for his
s ubjectivity to fully emerge. The end of the story is overrun with a series of
miscalculations and misunderstandings that arise each time Gabriel looks
at Gretta. Joyce shows us that as long as Gabriel is unable to see Gretta as
separate from his ideal of her, he will always misread their relationship. As
long as the nation defines itself according to its masculine desire, it will fail
to recognize its essential hybridity and never successfully emerge from the
entrapment of the domestic interior as a modern entity.
Inside of the hotel, the first time Gabriel looks in the mirror he sees
Gretta, not himself; and he still thinks she is filled with sexual passion:
“She had taken off her hat and cloak and was standing before a large
swinging mirror, unhooking her waist. Gabriel paused for a few moments,
watching her, and then said:—Gretta!”36 Gabriel’s misreading of the situ-
ation continues until, finally, Gretta breaks down crying:
She broke loose from him and ran to the bed and, throwing her arms across
the bedrail, hid her face. Gabriel stood stockstill for a moment in astonish-
ment and then followed her. As he passed in the way of the cheval glass he
caught sight of himself in full length, his broad, wellfilled shirtfront, the face
whose expression always puzzled him when he saw it in a mirror.37
After Gabriel finally sees his own face in the reflection, “A shameful con-
sciousness of his own person assailed him. […] the pitiable fatuous fellow
he had caught a glimpse of in the mirror.”38 What follows is yet another
blush, “the shame that burned upon his forehead,” and Gabriel’s real-
ization that “the time had come for him to set out on his journey west-
ward.”39 Different from Bloom, who sees his confrontation with Gerty
as “An optical illusion. Mirage. […] Homerule sun setting in the south-
east,”40 Gabriel peers outside of the window, considers his journey west,
but does not leave the domestic interior. At the end of Dubliners, Joyce
offers a version of Irish masculinity that remains trapped in the repeated
moments of misrecognition and the shameful blushes of frustrated mis-
takes. Gabriel can only see his nation through the window; he still does
not recognize it in the mirror.
The Female Body as Mirror after “The Dead”

Images of bodies partitioned by otherness or bodies that signify as duplici-
tous wholes appear often in Joyce’s texts. This suggests that he imag-
ined nationhood through the lens of a bifurcated identity, as did much
106 E. SCHEIBLE
of twentieth-century postcolonial Irish writing, both before and after

national independence. In twentieth-century Irish fiction, bodies regularly
serve as disrupted symbols of unity, signifying sexual difference, disability,
or transgendered physicality, and they consequently threaten to disrupt
the domestic interior of the nation. We need only look to Brian Friel’s
plays, Neil Jordan’s films, or Emma Donoghue’s and Patrick McCabe’s
novels for late-century examples of this motif. In Joyce’s work specifically,
we might think of Bloom’s famous appearance as a pregnant man in the
“Circe” episode of Ulysses as an extreme figuration of a nontraditional and
disrupted body.
In both the infamous bird-girl scene in A Portrait and the Nausicaa
episode in Ulysses, Joyce illustrates Ireland’s complicated colonial and
postcolonial identity crisis, where the recognition of national identity as
an infinitely divided yet communal experience results in expressions of
desire that emulate satisfaction without physical unification with another
body. Different from Gabriel’s experience in “The Dead,” both of these
moments of recognition occur outside of the home and on the sandy mar-
gins of the nation. They are singular and nonreproductive. In A Portrait,
Joyce mirrors Stephen’s artistic potential in the image of the bird-girl who
returns his gaze and literally forces his soul to speak. The bird-girl is nei-
ther a simple image of beauty nor a perfectly mortal reflection; rather, she
embodies the recognition of mortality for Stephen, who has momentarily
been freed from the “fear,” “incertitude,” and “shame” that clothed his
entrance into the priesthood.41 She is the movement that eventually breaks
the silence, evoking Stephen’s reader-recognition of self as other, self as
text, which manifests in an ejaculation of the soul. When Stephen fails to
communicate, his soul speaks, identifying him as both the reader of his
own mortality and the recognizer of the body and soul of his linguistic
subjectivity. Stephen’s inability to recognize his artistic call in anyone but
the bird-girl is a type of generative failure (or a misrecognition) that elicits
an ejaculation. When we compare Stephen’s interaction with the bird-
girl to his prior encounter with the Christian Brothers on the bridge, it
becomes clear that Joyce grounds Stephen’s recognition of his artistic call
in the bird-girl’s reflection, because she does not reflect his shame—the
shame of the priesthood that he rejects. Stephen feels shame when only
his body is reflected in the Brothers’ images and not his soul. Hence,
Stephen’s shame is attached to a misrecognition—a moment in Joyce’s
text when Stephen’s reflection does not include both body and soul, when
his reflection is not unified or complete. There is no shame, however, in his
euphoric experience with the bird-girl. If Stephen sees himself as Icarus,

the physical description of the bird-girl mirrors Stephen’s projected image
of himself.
Fritz Senn, among others, has pointed out the parallels between Joyce’s
description of the bird-girl in A Portrait and his portrayal of Gerty in
Nausicaa. Beyond the descriptive illustrations that figure both women as
images of the Virgin Mary and Irish girlhood, Joyce’s proposition in A
Portrait that Ireland is a hybridized body represented as a bird-girl seen
through Stephen’s eyes and recognized as Stephen’s soul continues when
Bloom sees Gerty on the beach and realizes that her body is disabled, her
mobility limited. Throughout the episode, Bloom identifies with Gerty’s
sexual desire, and, like Stephen’s expressions of joy on the beach, verbally
ejaculates another “O!” when he recognizes her lameness. In this Joycean
scenario, Ireland’s mirror stage manifests as a recognition and then expres-
sion of the desire of the self—Stephen’s ejaculation “Heavenly God!” and
Bloom’s “O!”—in the sexualized and transfigured female body. Joyce rep-
resents a version of Irish nationhood and its inability to offer a unified
portrayal of Irishness as a female body hybridized in its many physical con-
tortions or disabilities. Most significantly, in both A Portrait and Ulysses,
but not in “The Dead,” the male characters recognize the otherness of
their female doppelgangers and, in turn, reflect on their role in the con-
struction of the nation.
In The Subaltern “Ulysses,” Enda Duffy persuasively argues that women,
both as activists during the Irish anticolonial revolution and as characters in
modernist texts, emerged as “key signifiers of the nation itself in the repre-
sentational economy of the revolution.”42 However, he points out “it was
only as lone figures (in masculinist narratives) that they were allowed to sug-
gest the new nation.” Duffy’s argument is one of the first in Joyce criticism
to posit the female figures in Joyce’s novel, specifically Molly, as the figures
through which Joyce questions the future of the Irish nation and the unity
inherent in national identity. However, Gerty is as much a figure of national
identity in Ulysses as Molly Bloom. Although Duffy sees Molly as the truly
“lone” female figure in the novel, since “Penelope” is a narrative produced
outside of communal activity or communal presence, Gerty’s position as
the sole source of recognition for Bloom’s self-produced pleasure within
Nausicaa and Joyce’s reference to female onanism in the schema, aligns
her with Molly as a figure that is alone, even though she is accompanied
by other women and children on the strand. Her voice does not suggest
the narrative freedom that Molly’s voice has in “Penelope,” but I am not
108 E. SCHEIBLE
convinced that the free flowing nature of Molly’s monologue is our best
example of woman as a national metaphor in Joyce’s work. Because of her
geographical position on the edge of the island and her marginalized posi-
tion as a disabled woman in 1904 Dublin, Gerty’s role as a national image
might be more persuasive than Molly’s and more dialectically connected to
Bloom’s vision of his own identity formation, particularly since Nausicaa
follows “Cyclops,” where Bloom’s Jewishness marks him as Other and his
allegiance to his nation is questioned.
As he maps his analysis of the subaltern in Ulysses, Duffy positions Molly
alongside all of the women from the second half of the novel, includ-
ing Gerty, who are “the bearers and minders of children” rather than the
female members of the working class that surface in the first half.43 The
gendered division of labor that Duffy identifies as part of the colonial
regime in the novel’s first half, where working-class women are symbols of
the subaltern, transforms into a representation of economic abjection in
the second half. Duffy finds the scenes with women in the latter portion of
the novel to be the “most thoroughly delineated subalternity in Ulysses,”
because the female characters are “bourgeois women who are wives and
consumers” and thus the more “abject” figures of culture. Duffy’s goal
is to seek moments of “postcolonial subjectivity” in Ulysses, hoping to
identify the “utopian potential of the text,” and he argues that we “can
hardly hope that the male-centered realist narrative, copied from models
that celebrated an imperialist nationalist world, will prove an appropriate
vehicle.”44 Hence, we are left with female characters as possible figures for
a future community. But Duffy does not see such a community surface in
Ulysses; instead the novel “poses the more difficult question of what such
a community might imply.”
The implications of such a community lie in the projections of an origi-
nal, communal unification that postcolonial bodies and groups of bodies,
or nations, must reject because they are fictions of nationhood proliferated
as truths by an imperial culture. In other words, postcolonial subjectivity
must undergo a mirror stage where it recognizes the impossibility of uni-
fied nationhood implicit in its development and recognition as a nation.
Because women are the most obvious subaltern subjects in Duffy’s read-
ing of Ulysses, it is through the female characters that we are forced to ask
whether “unity can be imagined in any real sense at the moment of antico-
lonial revolution.”45 In Duffy’s analysis, the birth of the Free State is coter-
minous with a postcolonial redefinition of nationhood that rejects unity as
its founding principle. Irish independence, then, inherently demands divi-
sion and disunity; Irishness depends on more than an aesthetic reflection in

the cracked looking-glass of a servant. It depends on the recognition that a
looking-glass without a crack is a false image of national unity.
The crack in Bloom’s looking-glass is Gerty MacDowell. In the open-
ing pages of Nausicaa, Gerty is not only “as fair a specimen of winsome
Irish girlhood as one could wish to see,”46 but she also possesses eyes of
“the bluest Irish blue,”47 and when she blushes, she looks “so lovely in
her sweet girlish shyness that of a surety God’s fair land of Ireland did not
hold her equal.”48 In Gerty’s mind, and arguably Bloom’s, she exists as the
trademark image of a feminized and aesthetically perfected Ireland, where
consumer culture and sentimental novels have yoked Irishness with youth,
girlish beauty, and the expansiveness of God’s country. Gerty is Ireland’s
perfect, complete symbol—that is, except for “that one shortcoming”49
that she “always tried to conceal”;50 the “accident” that, when conjured,
reminded her that “the years were slipping by”51 and no longer was she a
girl, winsome and shy, with an idealized sense of perpetual youth. Gerty
tricks herself into believing in her perfection in Nausicaa by trusting the
mirror that reflects it: “She did it up all by herself and what joy was hers
when she tried it on then, smiling at the lovely reflection which the mirror
gave back to her!”52 Even when Gerty succumbs to the “gnawing sorrow”
that “is there all the time,”53 her insecurities are mediated by the mirror:
“Her very soul is in her eyes and she would give worlds to be in the privacy
of her own familiar chamber where, giving way to tears, she could have a
good cry and relieve her pent up feelings though not too much because
she knew how to cry nicely before the mirror. You are lovely, Gerty, it
said.”54 Gerty’s reflection in the mirror speaks to her, reassuring her of the
existence of the very thing that the mirror itself proves to be an illusion:
the self as a unified and complete being, lovely in its perfect wholeness.
From the beginning of Gerty’s episode in Ulysses, the use of the mirror as
a symbol of infinite duplicity collides with images of national duplicity and
Irishness, positioning the female, incomplete in both body and image, as
the locus for national disruption.
In Ulysses, the novel that straddles from afar an Ireland on the brink
of division, Joyce positions, through the figure of Gerty MacDowell, the
disabled female body as a source of traumatic confrontation and recogni-
tion for the nation, where a historically alienated and emasculated Ireland,
dreaming of the wholeness of nationhood and manhood, must experience
the mirror stage of its national development. Right before Bloom wishes
he could be “the rock she sat on,” he ruminates on seeing Howth, and by
110 E. SCHEIBLE
extension Ireland, in the distance “An optical illusion. Mirage. Land of the
setting sun this. Homerule sun setting in the southeast. My native land,
goodnight.”55 In Bloom’s thoughts, his desire for an amalgamation of
women, including both Molly and Gerty, overlaps with his identification
of the land where he is standing as the nation on which the “homerule
sun” finally set. It is after his voyeuristic confrontation with Gerty that
Bloom says goodnight to his “native land,” seeing the duplicity in both
woman and land—Gerty and Molly; Howth and Ireland—as the marker of
the end of the colony, where home rule is only an option when the nation
is nonexistent.
Joyce reminds us through Bloom that “History repeats itself. Ye crags
and peaks I’m with you once again. Life, love, voyage round your own
little world” suggesting that both Molly and Gerty, like Bloom himself,
are figures corresponding to Irish geography in Bloom’s mind.56 Bloom’s
role as a flâneur and a voyeur on the streets of Dublin traces a city that will
birth the revolution leading to the Irish Free State. If we follow this image
of the male body as the generator of national identity through Joyce’s
texts, culminating in Finnegans Wake, we are reminded of John Bishop’s
mapping of HCE’s body in Joyce’s Book of the Dark.57 If HCE, like Bloom,
commits a sexual transgression contingent on the female gaze for recogni-
tion of the offense, and his broken body then becomes a map of Dublin,
the partitioned nation is unimaginable without a fragmented and cracked
body conjured in the mirror of female duplicity.
Notes
1. Hugh Kenner, Joyce’s Voices (Los Angeles: University of California Press,
1978), 15.
2. For more on Joycean epiphanies, see James Joyce, Stephen Hero (New York:
New Directions Publishing Corporation, 1944); Irene Handy, “Joyce’s
Epiphanies,” The Sewanee Review, 54, no. 3 (1946): 449–467; Morris Beja,
Epiphany in the Modern Novel: Revelation as Art (London: Peter Owen
Publishers, 1971); and Joshua Jacobs, “Joyce’s Epiphanic Mode: Material
Language and the Representation of Sexuality in Stephen Hero and Portrait,”
Twentieth Century Literature, 46, no. 1 (2000): 20–33.
3. Vincent J. Cheng, Joyce, Race, and Empire (New York: Cambridge
4. Gerry Smyth and Jo Croft, introduction to Our House: The Representation
of Domestic Space in Modern Culture ed. Gerry Smyth and Jo Croft
(Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2006), 13.
5. Rita Felski, The Gender of Modernity (Cambridge: Harvard University

Press, 1995), 16.
6. Joseph Valente, The Myth of Manliness in Irish National Culture, 1880–1922
(Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2011), 1.
7. Kevin Whelan, “The Memories of ‘The Dead,’” in The Yale Journal of
Criticism 15, no. 1 (2002): 60.
2013), 41.
9. Kimberly J. Devlin, “The Female Eye: Joyce’s Voyeuristic Narcissists,” in
New Alliances in Joyce Studies: When It’s Aped to Foul a Delfian, ed. Bonnie
Kime Scott (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1988), 140.
10. Suzette Henke, “Gerty MacDowell: Joyce’s Sentimental Heroine,” in

Women of Joyce, ed. Suzette Henke and Elane Unkeless (Urbana: University
of Illinois Press, 1982), 136.
12. See Peggy Ochoa, “Joyce’s ‘Naussica’: The Paradox of Advertising
Narcissism,” in James Joyce Quarterly 30. 4/31.1 (1993): 785–86. Implicit
within the familiar Lacanian, psychoanalytic term “mirror stage” is both rec-
ognition and alienation of the self. Identity according to Lacan is a kind of
alienation and recognition of infinite bifurcation. The mirror stage is both a
moment of bodily recognition, when an infant sees its own physical image as
a reflection, and a moment of historical temporality, when the “formation of
the individual” or the “agency of the ego” is introduced to the fiction of
selfhood. In this fiction, the aloneness of individuality is at once a separation
of self from self and an illusive bridge between self and reality. I invoke Lacan
to suggest that the mirror stage exemplifies not only what is at stake during
the development of identity within the individual, but also what might help
us to interpellate Joyce’s vision of the development of the nation during
imminent partition. Here, I am also borrowing lightly from Althusser’s con-
cept of interpellation, where, as Peggy Ochoa clarifies, “individuals see, in an
ideological mirror, an idealized image with which they identify, and they
become bound to the higher authority of the ideological absolute subject”
(785–86). In this vision, national identity emerges as an imagined, and
according to Althusser, idealized community dependent on the fiction of
nationhood as a unified concept. For both Lacan and the postcolonial
nation-state, the subsequent recognition of that unification as an impossibil-
ity is an essential necessity. In my reading, it is through a kind of mirror
stage, one specifically involving female characters, that Joyce imagines a
national identity based on non-unification.
13. Vicki Mahaffey and Jill Shashasty, introduction to Collaborative Dubliners:
Joyce in Dialogue edited by Vicki Mahaffey and Jill Shashasty (Syracuse:
Syracuse University Press, 2012), 18.
112 E. SCHEIBLE
14. Ibid., 18–19.

15. Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd ed., s.v. “lily.”
16. James Joyce, Dubliners (1914), Norton Critical Edition, ed. Margot
Norris (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2006), 151.
17. Ibid., 151–52.
18. See Luke Gibbons, “‘The Cracked Looking Glass’” of Cinema: James
Joyce, John Huston, and the Memory of ‘The Dead,’ The Yale Journal of
Criticism 15, no. 1 (2002): 127–148 and Marjorie Howes, “Tradition,
Gender, and Migration in ‘The Dead,’ or: How Many People has Gretta
Conroy Killed?” The Yale Journal of Criticism 15, no. 1 (2002): 149–171.
20. Ibid., 154.
21. Ibid., 156.
22. Ibid., 155.
23. James Joyce, Ulysses (1922), The Gabler Edition, ed. Hans Walter Gabler,
Wolfhard Steppe, and Claus Melchior (New York: Random House, Inc.,
1986), 12.1422–23 and 12.1428.
25. W.B. Yeats, The Poems of W.B. Yeats, ed. Richard J. Finneran (New York:
Macmillan Publishing Company, 1983), 1.10.
27. See note 24 above (emphasis mine).
28. Ibid., 187.
29. Ibid., 188.
30. Ibid., 191.
31. Ibid., 189.
32. Ibid., 194.
33. Ibid.
34. Ibid., 162.
35. Ibid., 182.
37. Ibid, 190.
39. Ibid., 191, 194.
40. Joyce, Ulysses, 13.1076–1080.
41. James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), Norton
Critical Edition, ed. John Paul Riquelme (New York: W.W. Norton &
Company, 2007), 149.
42. Enda Duffy, The Subaltern “Ulysses” (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 1994), 167.
43. Ibid., 170.
44. Ibid., 170–71.
45. Ibid., 172.

46. Joyce, Ulysses, 13.81.
47. Ibid., 13.108.
48. Ibid. 13.121–22.
49. Ibid., 13.650.
50. Ibid., 13.651.
51. Ibid., 13.649.
52. Ibid., 13.161–62.
53. Ibid., 13.188–89.
54. Ibid., 13.189–92.
55. Ibid., 13.1076–80.
56. Ibid., 13.1092.
57. See John Bishop, Joyce’s Book of the Dark (Madison: University of Wisconsin
Press, 1986) for an anthropomorphized map of Dublin.
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Kime Scott. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1988. 135–43.
Duffy, Enda. The Subaltern Ulysses. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
1994.
Felski, Rita. The Gender of Modernity. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995.
of James Joyce 1898–1915. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013.
Gordon, John. Joyce and Reality: The Empirical Strikes Back. Syracuse: Syracuse
Henke, Suzette, “Gerty MacDowell: Joyce’s Sentimental Heroine,” Women in
Joyce, edited by Suzette Henke and Elane Unkeless, 123–149. Urbana:
Joyce, James. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, 1916. Norton Critical
Edition. Edited by John Paul Riquelme. New York: W.W. Norton & Company,
2007.
––––––. Dubliners, 1914. Norton Critical Edition. Edited by Margot Norris. New
York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2006.
––––––. Ulysses, 1922. The Gabler Edition. Edited by Hans Walter Gabler,
Wolfhard Steppe, and Claus Melchior. New York: Random House, Inc., 1986.
Kenner, Hugh. Joyce’s Voices. Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1978.
Lacan, Jacques. “The Mirror Stage as Formative Function of the I.” Écrits.
Translated by Alan Sheridan. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1982.
114 E. SCHEIBLE
Mahaffey, Vicki and Jill Shashaty. Introduction to Collaborative “Dubliners”: Joyce

in Dialogue. Edited by Vicki Mahaffey and Jill Shashaty. Syracuse: Syracuse
University Press, 2012. 1–22.
Ochoa, Peggy. “Joyce’s ‘Nausicaa’: The Paradox of Advertising Narcissism.” James
Joyce Quarterly, 30.4/31.1 (1993): 783–93.
Oxford English Dictionary. 2nd ed. 20 vols. Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1989.
Smyth, Gerry and Jo Croft. Introduction to Our House: The Representation of
Domestic Space in Modern Culture. Edited by Gerry Smyth and Jo Croft,
Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2006. 11–26.
Valente, Joseph. The Myth of Manliness in Irish National Culture, 1880–1922.
Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2011.
Whelan, Kevin. “The Memories of ‘The Dead.’” The Yale Journal of Criticism, 15,
no.1 (2002): 59–97.
Yeats, W. B. The Poems of W. B. Yeats. Edited by Richard J. Finneran. New York:
Macmillan Publishing Company, 1983.
CHAPTER 7
Joyce’s Blinders: An Urban Ecocritical Study

of Dubliners and More
Joseph P. Kelly
One sunny day in June 1894, the twelve-year-old James Joyce, playing
hooky with his brother, encountered a suspicious elderly figure they
thought might “be an escaped madman”1 and whose behavior led them
to presume that he was a “sodomite.”2 Eleven years later, Joyce wrote it up
in the second half of “An Encounter,” a strange sort of story that begins
with students playing cowboys and Indians.3 Greg Winston has demon-
strated that such play initiates the boys into the role of colonizer, and as
the last generation of post-colonial studies has proven beyond much dis-
sent, that even as early as 1905 Joyce was deconstructing the discourses of
colonialism and nationalism.4 Probably without Joyce’s conscious inten-
tion, the boys’ experience in the second half of the story, though not quite
so romantic as a foray into Indian territory, follows a similar psychological
trajectory. If we read the story as urban ecocritics, it reveals how the power
relation between Dublin neighborhoods parallels the colonizer/colonized
dynamic.
The journey in “An Encounter” begins in the vicinity of North
Richmond Street, just south of the Royal Canal. The narrator and Mahony
meet at the Canal Bridge, with a backward glance at “the branches of the
J. P. Kelly (*)
Department of English, College of Charleston, Charleston, SC, USA
e-mail: KellyJ@cofc.ede

DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-39336-0_7
116 J. P. KELLY
tall trees which lined the mall [and] were gay with little light green leaves
and … sunlight slanted through them on to the water.”5 The mall here is
Charleville Mall, the middle-class, park-like promenade facing the canal.
The Joyce family lived nearby on North Richmond Street for three happy
years. One neighbor, John Clancy, the model for Long John Fanning in
Ulysses, was later elected Lord Mayor of Dublin, which gives some indica-
tion of the class of residents. Many of Joyce’s characters, including the
Dillons, Mahonys, Boardmans, Caffreys and Lenehans, come from this
pleasant quarter.6
Crossing the bridge, the boys walk straight on to the Vitriol Works
at the corner of the North Strand and Wharf Roads, a sprawling com-
pound on the south bank of the sluggish Tolka River that manufac-
tured sulfuric acid.7 No gay green leaves paint the dinginess of the
industrial area, and naturally enough its natives are “two ragged boys”
and a “crowd of ragged girls.”8 Since at least the sixteenth century,
“ragged” has been a short-hand, higher-class term for the poor, and
it invokes a dismissive attitude, as it does in “Counterparts,” when
some “ragged urchins” hawking newspapers form part of Farrington’s
sensation of a bustling crowd.9 (The Oxford English Dictionary actu-
ally quotes Ulysses for a twentieth-century example of this usage.) The
unfashionable clothes of the northside children and the prep school
garb of the southsiders divide the children more effectively than the
physical boundary of the Royal Canal. From the factory, the Belvedere
boys travel down to the docks on the north bank of the Liffey, where
they witness “the spectacle of Dublin’s commerce” and mimic the
workers eating their lunches. Then they take the ferry over to the fish-
ing village in Ringsend, feeling that they have entered yet a fourth
region. Here, the sun that had been so friendly coming through the
trees of the mall becomes oppressive, bleaching the musty biscuits in
the grocers’ windows, echoing, perhaps, the tropical outskirts of the
real Empire.10
The narrator experiences each of these four parts of the city as clearly
distinct regions, what urban ecologists call “natural areas” or geographic
sections that divide a city into what Robert Park calls a “mosaic of little
worlds that touch but do not penetrate.”11 Some natural areas are defined
by the ethnicity or the economic or social markers that segregate the
population into various neighborhoods. Others are “moral” regions dis-
tinguished by the types of activities performed there. Park and Ernest
JOYCE’S BLINDERS 117
Burgess, two of the founding members of the Chicago School of urban

sociologists, developed the notion of natural areas, and a third, Roderick
McKenzie, described their approach as “ecological,” suggesting that the
laws governing the distribution of people in a city could be discovered
by fieldwork and meticulous observation, just as scientists discovered the
causes of species distributions in natural ecosystems.12 Burgess’s observa-
tions, for example, led him to conceive of the city as various concentric
circles surrounding the commercial inner loop: a “zone in transition” that
included several ethnic and immigrant ghettos; a “zone of workingmen’s
homes”; a “residential zone” of “bright light” and apartment houses
and “single family dwellings”; and a “commuters zone.” After a century
of research and refinement, Burgess’s “zones” seem crudely drawn, but
the natural area is still the basic unit of urban study. Anyone who has
attended a contentious municipal zoning hearing knows that the “socio-
spatial dynamics” and “spatial organization” that constitute such urban
“regions” are still vital to city politics.13
The Chicago School’s approach to studying cities, especially its reli-
ance on data, is the basis of contemporary urban studies, yet practi-
cally no literary critics—even those concerned with the representation
of cities in literature—use its methods. As I’ll discuss below, nearly
every urban literary critic is inspired by Walter Benjamin, eschewing
the American, empirical school of urban studies for the more specula-
tive analysis practiced by Frankfurt’s Institute for Social Research. One
intention of this article is to attempt a new type of criticism—what
I’m calling urban ecocriticism—that draws from Chicago rather than
Frankfurt. The attempt should not be construed as a rejection of those
critics who descend from Benjamin. Their value hardly needs any valida-
tion from me. As regards Joyce studies, traditional urban literary critics
have developed some very convincing arguments about the experience
of the colonial subject in provincial cities (to take an important exam-
ple) and about the effects of mass culture (to cite another). In these
studies, Joyce is prescient in analyzing modern urban life and bold in
resisting oppressive forces. But this method of literary study exhibits a
blind spot, as if the lens distorts or even obscures the largest segment of
the early twentieth-century city: the poor. Joyce himself wore the same
blinders. So, the second intent of this chapter is to add some blame to
Joyce’s deserved praise. The methods of the Chicago School reveal how
Joyce’s texts help cities exploit their poor.
118 J. P. KELLY
Urban Literary Criticism

Early European urban theorists were convinced that modern cities
are unnatural and inhumane. Ferdinand Tönnies’s Gemeinschaft und
Gesellschaft, which began to theorize the psychological experience of cities
as compared to villages, was published in 1887, when Joyce was just five
years old, and his influential “The Present Problem of Social Structure”
was published in English in 1905. Georg Simmel’s “The Metropolis and
Mental Life” came out in 1903, and Max Weber began publishing The
Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism in 1904. All three suggested
that humans naturally live in villages and small towns, and they considered
the leviathan we know as the modern, capitalist city to be an artificial,
unnatural place that harmed the human psyche. Simmel, for example, pos-
tulated “how the personality accommodates itself in the adjustments to
[the city’s] external forces”; in other words, how “the person resists being
leveled down and worn out” by the “social-technological mechanism” of
the modern city.14
Benjamin built on that foundation. His essays on Baudelaire, the
flâneur, and nineteenth-century Paris examine cultural artifacts (shop
windows, newspapers, etc.) to imagine their effects on the mind of the
individual. Nearly everyone who writes about cities and literature today
pays due respect to these essays, emulating his speculative method and
the presumptions laid down by Simmel, Tönnies, and Weber. For exam-
ple, Richard Lehan’s comprehensive study, The City in Literature, cites
Simmel, Weber, and Emile Durkheim, asserting that, “Modern man,
placed under great stress [in cities], feared becoming superfluous and
anonymous.” Following in their footsteps, Lehan centers his book on the
sense of alienation that the city imposes on the individual, and his discus-
sion of modern writers like Joyce begins with his recitation of the “inward
turn,” the psychological experience of the individual city dweller as theo-
rized especially by Benjamin.15 Lehan is exemplary: nearly every urban
literary critic elaborates the basic conflict uncovered by these Continental
thinkers, explaining exactly how the mechanized city menaces humanity
and how humanity resists its dehumanizing forces.
Joyce critics are no exception. Michael Begnal invokes Benjamin and
Foucault as the theoretical foundation of the essays collected in his Joyce
and the City.16 Enda Duffy’s Subaltern “Ulysses,” like the Benjamin that
inspired him, pays most of its attention to the psyche of the city dweller as
it encounters a hostile urban environment. Bloom’s “intense flânerie” is
the colonial’s way of “escaping interpellation” by the forces at work in the

colonial city.17 Ultimately, Duffy’s criticism looks and sounds very much
like Simmel’s version of urban mental life overlaid with colonial politics.
Christine Cusick’s recent study of Dubliners follows the Benjamin pattern.
Despite her attention to class and economics, for example, Cusick equates
urban sociology with the study of how the city impedes or advances the
individual’s “self-actualization.”18 She exposes the forces in Dublin that
paralyze the spirit of the individual.
Though Joyce hardly shared Tönnie’s nostalgia for the pre-modern
village and small town, he encouraged this approach when he claimed
to have written a “chapter in the moral history” of his country and to
have chosen Dublin, because that city seemed to him to be the “centre of
paralysis.”19 The generations of Joyceans who anatomized paralysis follow
in train behind Simmel, Weber, and Benjamin. In 2014, Liam Lanigan
asserted that “the alienation and ‘paralysis’ of the characters in Joyce’s
early work [are] … produced by … the technological and cultural urbani
zation of the Dublin they occupy.”20 Desmond Harding, who seems to me
to be the Joyce Industry’s most informed practitioner of interdisciplinary
urban studies, also reads “An Encounter” in the way Benjamin (and Joyce)
bequeathed us, as a pathetic and doomed quest for personal liberation.21
This tradition of urban literary criticism speculates about the experience
of a “metropolitan type,” who is supposedly universal but almost always
resembles the people writing about him. Back in 1903, Simmel pictured the
“metropolitan type of man” interacting with “his merchants and custom-
ers [and] his domestic servants.”22 He conceded that the type “exists in
thousands of variants,” but the only variants he could imagine commanded
more than, say, £500 per year, to use Virginia Woolf’s felicitous figure. The
servants cleaning Simmel’s house and cooking his food, the folks shining his
shoes and sweating in the laundries, the masses of poor in general, had no
mental life worth noting: for Simmel, they were part of the urban machin-
ery preying on the psyche of the metropolitan. Benjamin exhibits the same
prejudice. His famous dissection of the feuilleton, for instance, argued that
this section of newspapers, newly invented in the mid-nineteenth century,
trained readers in a way of imagining the city. Logically, that way of see-
ing corresponds to the portion of the city’s citizens who read the feuil-
leton section of newspapers, and Benjamin cites the significant increase in
newspaper circulation in the mid-nineteenth century (200,000 readers in
1846) to assert the ubiquity of its influence.23 However, the mid-century
120 J. P. KELLY
population of Paris’s metropolitan area was close to one-and-a-half million

people. Compared to anything that came before them, newspapers certainly
constituted a mass cultural phenomenon, but if we confuse the experience
of a lot of people with the experience of most people, we will misconstrue
urban life. Benjamin equated metropolitan experience with the experience
of the petit-bourgeois, which relegated most of the people who actually
lived in Paris to the background, the unsettling bustle, like the city’s bewil-
dering buildings and shop windows and traffic and noise. Similarly, when
Cusick examines the forces that prevent “self-actualization” in Dublin, she
is talking about the factors that impede the personal development of the
middle-class citizen, who is always Joyce’s subject. Duffy’s flâneur, despite
his subaltern status, occupies a position of privilege relative to most of his
fellow citizens, who do not have the luxury of walking about town. Duffy
is not unaware of this fact, though his awareness does not much influence
his speculations about the subaltern. The lens of urban literary criticism
obscures privilege, imagining a modern metropolitan “type” who must
ward off the dehumanizing effect imposed on him by the mere existence of
most of the humans who live in the metropolis.
Joyce seems to reproduce this attitude without even realizing that he’s
doing so. It is as habitual to him as it is to his readers. The narrator of “A
Little Cloud” mentions “[a] horde of grimy children [who] populated the
street. They stood or ran in the roadway or crawled up the steps before the
gaping doors or squatted like mice upon the thresholds.” Little Chandler
“gave them no thought,” and Joyce gave them little more, except to char-
acterize them as vermin.24 They are part of the alienating city preying on
the psyche of the people whose experience counts. “An Encounter” has
no interest in how the ragged children came to live in the shadow of the
sulfuric acid factory, because they are part of the environment with which
the people who are important enough to be characters must contend, part
of the backdrop or machinery of his city, just as they were for Simmel.
Dubliners is not a chapter in the moral history of Ireland. It is only con-
cerned with the urban Irish Catholic bourgeoisie.
One might protest that we do not need a new critical apparatus to come
to this conclusion. Generations ago, before they were vanquished by the
New Critics, leftists upbraided Joyce for seeing the world through middle-
class blinders. Philip Rahv, editor of the Partisan Review in the 1930s, tak-
ing a “Trotskyist cultural perspective,” voiced his disapprobation, as did the
Congress of Soviet Writers when they condemned modernists generally and
Joyce specifically in 1934. The accusation has stunk of disloyalty ever since,
so we’ve forgotten it.25
This new critical apparatus is valuable because it revives this

nderstanding of Joyce without resorting to communist ideologies. The
u
Chicago School had no interest in overthrowing capitalism. It accepted
the capitalist city as a natural human environment, and urban ecologists
elucidate the laws that obtain there not to dismantle capitalism but to
improve it. Urban ecology informs responsible city planning, and to the
extent that planners pursue the common weal, urban ecology promotes
social justice. Urban ecocriticism has the same moral dimension.
Urban Ecocriticism
Unfortunately, the term at the root of urban ecocriticism, urban ecology,
means two different things. One derives from the current explosion in eco-
criticism, which itself derives from the branch of natural science called ecol-
ogy, which studies the interconnections of species as a system. Ecocriticism
analyzes the “thematic, artistic, social, historical, ideological” functions of
“the natural environment represented in documents.” Ecology and eco-
criticism both pre-suppose an opposition between the “natural” world
of animals and the “human” world of cultural artifacts. James Fairhall’s
ecocritical study of the “Cyclops” episode of Ulysses, for example, begins
with the definition I quoted above, and the fine essays collected by Robert
Brazeau and Derek Gladwin in their 2014 Eco-Joyce: The Environmental
Imagination of James Joyce presume the human/nature binary. Pavement
is about as unnatural a ground as you could find, and so most ecocritics,
like most ecologists, ignore cities.26
The field is beginning to change. A few ecologists have started studying
the distributions of non-human organisms in human-built environments,
and recently, they have even begun to accept that the behavior of humans
should be part of their research. Scientists practicing this discipline think
of it (logically enough) as a branch of ecology and call what they are
doing urban ecology.27 A few essays in Eco-Joyce take this approach. When
Christine Cusick uses the term urban ecocriticism, she means the docu-
mentary representation of nature in the urban ecosystem.
Urban ecology means something else to sociologists, and despite its
obscurity today, their definition has the prior claim. In 1872, a young
woman, the first female student admitted to MIT, her Victorian-era skirt
billowing in the sea breeze, kneeled down on a mudbank to fill a vial with
water from Boston’s Back Bay. Then another vial full of Charles River
water. More vials from scores of other locations. She was dealing with a
122 J. P. KELLY
humanitarian crisis. Refugees of Ireland’s famines swelled the slums of

Boston, quadrupling the city’s size in a generation, and they were dying
in shocking rates, many from water-borne diseases. Fewer than half of the
Irish American children born in Boston lived to see their sixth birthday.
The Massachusetts Board of Health, a bureau created just a few years
earlier, commissioned a study of the Boston’s water supplies. The woman
conducting this study was Ellen Swallow Richards, and her first-hand
research helped her form a theory of urban forces. By 1883, she was teach-
ing the first sanitary engineering class in the world. By 1887, she was
the State Board’s water inspector, and in 1892, before an audience near
Copley Square, she introduced the world to a new science: ecology, or the
study of “the interaction and the interrelationship between the environ-
ment and organisms.”28 In the original sense of ecology, those organisms
were the Irish living in Boston’s slums.
Very quickly, botanists saw the utility of Richard’s concept, and by 1905,
ecology designated the new science that studied the economy of plant spe-
cies as they distributed themselves throughout a natural area. (According
to the Oxford English Dictionary, the concept of an “ecosystem” was still
coalescing; that term would not be invented for another thirty years.)
Ecology did not yet include the study of animals.29 Even so, human beings
dropped from the scope of ecology in the next decade, while animals were
added, so that when Roderick McKenzie defined “human ecology” as the
“study of the spatial and temporal relations of human beings as affected by
the selective, distributive, and accommodative forces of the environment,”
he was using it metaphorically, perhaps not even realizing he was restoring
ecology to its original sense.30 The metaphor stuck, and today’s sociologists
consider urban ecology as a branch of urban studies.31
In the sociological context, the urban ecologist wants to discover the
forces that select human beings to live in certain places; the social forces
that unequally distribute resources to these various places; and how people
accommodate themselves to groups by developing distinct attitudes and sen-
timents. The urban ecologist uncovers the natural tendencies of the modern
city (calling these tendencies natural “laws” might carry the analogy with
animal ecology too far), which in turn allows city planners to predict the
effects of public policies. Urban ecocritics, then, pay far greater attention
to material evidence than Benjamin did, evidence of both the city’s built
structure and the lived experience of its various populations. They are far
more interested in the behavior of human groups in relation to each other
within the “ecosystem” of the city than with the psychic experience of the
individual confronted by a leviathan. They try to determine what Park called

the “collective psychology” and “collective behavior” of these groups. A
residential neighborhood segregated by economics or ethnicity or other
social forces will exhibit a common way of looking at things and a shared
interest in public policies. Similarly, specific areas of a city are coded for
certain types of behavior. But the relation between groups and geography is
more complex than simply assigning a certain ideology to a neighborhood.
Park wonders, for instance, “What are the mores of the shop girl? the immi-
grant? the politician? and the labor agitator?” In today’s parlance and in the
context of public policy debates, we think of these collectives as “interest
groups” within a system of “identity politics.”32 Shop girls as a group may
not map easily onto a city’s geography, but they constitute a distinct popu-
lation of city dwellers, a cohort that exerts force on a city’s ecosystem and
collectively feels pressure as a cohort.
Interestingly, Park thought that realistic fiction provides researchers with
an important body of data. Urban ecologists need to read Émile Zola, he
said, “if for no other reason than to enable us to read the newspapers intel-
ligently.”33 (The interpretation of newspapers is crucial to urban ecology.)
Joyce, as we all know, imagined with some justice (if also with wounded
vanity) that Dubliners would turn him into the “Irish Zola,” and the care
with which he famously tried to recreate the city of his youth justifies the
urban ecocritic’s scrutiny.34 In so much as they are faithful records of real
life, Joyce’s books testify to the city’s geospatial relations and the relations
between segregated populations, even when Joyce himself was unconscious
of such issues. I want to emphasize that last point: Joyce need not have
been consciously aware of what he reveals to us. It is on this point especially
that my argument differs from most other Joyceans.
Competition is the fundamental principle governing the relations
between urban groups. “The place relation[s] of a given community to
other communities,” McKenzie explains, are “the products of competi-
tion and selection, and are continuously in process of change as new fac-
tors enter to disturb the competitive relations or to facilitate mobility.”35
Rennie Short’s 2006 Urban Theory emphasizes how the “operation of
power and the struggle for power” organizes the city. Competition between
groups, then, must be at the heart of urban ecocriticism. The “contested
nature of urban space,” for example, is axiomatic in the new and fascinat-
ing collection of urban ecocritical essays edited by Giovanna Sonda, Urban
Plots, Organizing Cities.36 Similarly, Barbara Mennel’s Cities and Cinema
holds that “these power relations are organized by social difference in
124 J. P. KELLY
class, gender, age, race, and ethnicity, which produce urban patterns and
processes.” Films, Mennel contends, “reflect such urban patterns” by cod-
ing neighborhoods, landscapes and cityscapes.37
Like film, literature encodes the city’s space, which is why Park thought
it so valuable to his research. Also like film, literature teaches readers how
to interpret those codes, how to make sense of the city’s complexities and
novelties. Joyce criticism has skirted on the edge of such insights for years.
We are map-obsessed, and this obsession has been paving the ground
for urban ecology. Books like Frank Delaney’s James Joyce’s Odyssey: A
Guide to the Dublin of “Ulysses,” have spawned a half-dozen useful web-
sites that map Joyce onto Dublin. These sites are but one manifestation
of the renaissance in geography powered by new computer applications in
geographic information systems, or GIS.38 Urban ecocriticism attaches lit-
erature to this resurgence in urban geography.39 Urban Plots, for instance,
concerns itself with land-use, collective behavior and similar issues typi-
cally of interest to urban ecologists, employing a method its editors call
“reverse engineering” that “re-territorialize[s] space through [a study of]
urban practices and narrative.” Not surprisingly, Chicago School soci-
ologists, like Robert Park, inform its method.40 The subfield of “politi-
cal ecology” as theorized by Paul Robbins moves literary criticism in the
direction of Chicago-style, materialist sociology.
Armed with such information, Joyceans are beginning to think about
cities in the Chicago-school way. Greg Winston’s contribution to Eco-
Joyce departs from the study of nature to peer into “how literature depicts
the interconnectivity of people, their surrounding and their environmental
resources that are the essence of ecological awareness.” Winston looks
at competition over clean water and its unequal distribution through-
out Dublin.41 Michael Rubenstein’s Public Works: Infrastructure, Irish
Modernism, and the Postcolonial is exemplary. Liam Lanigan’s James Joyce,
Urban Planning and Irish Modernism: Dublins of the Future is another
interesting case. His use of Dublin’s planning documents brings his own
methods in line with the Chicago School, yet the little theory Lanigan
invokes derives from the standard, Benjamin-inspired urban literary criti-
cism, which renders him very little help and, I think, leads him to mistake
Joyce’s intentions, as I’ll discuss below. Burgess, Park, and McKenzie’s
The City would serve Lanigan and anyone interested in urban ecocriticism
far better than Benjamin’s Arcades Project. Nevertheless, I think Lanigan’s
book will prove to be the starting point for any urban ecocritic’s study of
Joyce. As he explicates Stephen Dedalus’s first explorations of Dublin in A
Portrait, for instance, Lanigan is not interested in the alienating s ensations

that so preoccupy older urban literary criticism. He is looking for evidence
of the “modes of social organization that bear directly on the experience
of city life.” Lanigan’s central concern is the city fathers’ “near-willful
blindness to the complexity of the problem of poverty in Dublin.”42
Encountering Poor People

Unconsciously, Dubliners records the competition between Dublin’s rising
Catholic middle class, still a relatively small portion of the general popula-
tion, and the urban poor, who make up most of the city’s citizens.43 Why
are those children in “An Encounter” living in the shadow of a sulfuric
acid factory? More importantly, why have Joyce’s critics not yet asked why?
These are the kinds of questions Park, Burgess, and McKenzie answered.
The laboratory for the Chicago School of sociology was the City of Big
Shoulders itself, which burgeoned from a village of a few hundred in the
1830s to a city of 1.7 million in 1900: two-thirds of that 1.7 million were
foreign born, making Chicago the exemplar of New World cities, entirely
dependent upon recent migrations. So the early urban ecologists discov-
ered the natural tendency of in-coming, homogenous immigrant popula-
tions to occupy ghettos in Burgess’s “transitional zone”; over a generation
or so, this group would assimilate to mainstream culture and move on to
more prosperous neighborhoods further from the inner city. A new immi-
grant group would move into the vacated ghetto. The process is gradual
but inexorable, what McKenzie called the law of “invasion-succession.”44
Old world cities like Dublin followed their own law of migration—
something akin to what Raymond Williams discussed in his essay, “The
Metropolis and the Emergence of Modernism,” which is a particularly
fine example of urban ecocriticism and was far ahead of its time. Williams
examined collective behavior and the lived experience of identifiable
groups: the nineteenth-century migration of rural workers to the indus-
trializing cities and the anxiety that this migration triggered among the
respectable, middle-class urbanites who already were there.45 Dubliners
records several instances of these invasions. For example, we know from
“Araby” that the proximity of the Christian Brothers’ school to North
Richmond Street represents an uneasy mixing between the territories of
the ragged children and of Joyce’s fancier school, the Jesuit Belvidere
College. North Richmond was near the canal, the very frontier of the
respectable neighborhood. Those living in the area felt some anxiety over
126 J. P. KELLY
the opening of Dublin’s first purpose-built, free-standing public library

in Charleville Mall. This building sits under the filtered sunlight that the
narrator of “An Encounter” notes, just before heading across the canal,
but it does not really belong on the south side. Such lending libraries, like
Carnegie libraries generally, catered to the working class and faced a not-
in-my-backyard attitude among middle-class Dubliners, who feared that
they might nudge respectable neighborhoods down the slide from middle
class to working class.46
In “An Encounter,” the invasion goes the other way: the middle-class
boys sally forth into a working-class neighborhood. They are slumming.
Earl Ingersoll’s essay, “The Psychic Geography of Joyce’s Dubliners,” does
a very good job of discerning that Joyce intended his stories to present
a mythic “East” that symbolizes escape from the maze-like paralysis of
Dublin. In “Araby,” the purveyors of the bazaar erected a fantasy cityscape
as a way for middle-class Dubliners to experience the exotic East without
the danger of real travel. Ringsend, in “An Encounter,” figures exactly the
same way: an exotic eastern locale promising temporary escape from the
stifling middle-class life on North Richmond Street. By noting how the
two places are essentially identical in the young narrator’s imagination,
Ingersoll inadvertently provides the urban ecocritic with the key to how
the city organizes itself geographically and how it distributes resources.47
Such spatial relations depended on how the city’s policy-makers imagined
the geography of their city, and they assigned to Ringsend the role of
exotic locale.
We learn a little from Dubliners about what it was like to really live in
Ringsend. The streets are squalid and suffer under an oppressive sunlight.
Their condition is summed up by the absence of a dairy. That slight detail
is telling. Many dairies were still family farms or cowsheds that sold milk
to the public, but the industry was transitioning to factory production,
either through public ownership or cooperatives.48 Legislation was bring-
ing these dairies into compliance with a higher standard of sanitation in
order to fight infectious diseases, such as tuberculosis. Provisions in the
law for “infant milk dépóts” in urban areas indicate that cow’s milk was an
essential source of nutrition in Dublin circa 1900.49 So the lack of a dairy
indicates a condition similar to what we call “food deserts” in our cities
today. The lack registers only as an inconvenience to travelers in the story,
and so it registers in readers, but the urban ecocritic should recognize that
the children in Ringsend do not have ready access to this food staple.50
Such privations must seem natural if this area is to function as an exotic

East. Joyce is not alone in this type of treatment. Critics have long since
identified the pattern in Victorian literature by which the urban poor func-
tion as an equivalent to the “natives” on the Empire’s periphery.51 So it
seems more or less commonplace that at the furthest end of their jour-
ney, just beyond the squalid streets of Ringsend, on the east bank of the
Dodder River, the narrator and Mahony should come face-to-face with
a bizarre, unsettling, sexual deviant. Where else would we expect to find
someone so driven by his sexual impulse? Like Marlow’s journey in Heart
of Darkness, this “encounter” probes the caves hidden below the con-
science and haunted by impulses too disturbing to acknowledge.
Joyce’s old josser, the reader of Sir Walter Scott and Thomas Moore
and Lord Lytton, actually came from the safe side of the canal bridge,
just as Marlow’s Kurtz came from Europe. But unlike Kurtz, he did not
go out to civilize the natives, nor did the natives tempt and corrupt him.
The question the urban ecologist thinks to ask, which I don’t think any
other Joyce critics have asked, is this: What is this middle-class pedophile
doing all the way out in Ringsend? How did he end up there? Any plausible
backstory indicates that he is in Ringsend because the city of Dublin did
not allow such predators under the shade trees of Charleville Mall. The
ecology of Dublin guided him away from North Richmond Street and
toward the banks of the Dodder. At least one of the forces that drove
him there is the class-consciousness we see forming in the boy-narrator’s
psyche, a prejudice to which Joyce is prone. That is the attitude that sexual
impulses—especially those that trouble us deeply—ought to be expressed
in the poor districts of the city. That is their natural habitat, just as the
European expects to find there and so indulges his own sexual savagery
in Africa, and just as the African woman on the banks of the Congo River
exudes sexuality while Kurtz’s European fiancé in Brussels represses it.
“An Encounter” is not at all worried that Ringsend has no dairy and that
pedophiles prowl its parkland. Such seems the natural order of things,
and by portraying it so, the story invites readers to share this middle-class
attitude. In other words, the story turns Ringsend into an exotic fantasy, a
construct just as imaginative and artificial as the bizarre called Araby that
was erected on the edge of fashionable Ballsbridge. The difference is this:
pretending that poor neighborhoods are exotic places affects urban public
policy. In this case, the story trains people to think that Ringsend’s priva-
tions are natural.
128 J. P. KELLY
Surreal City
That pattern of thought repeats itself spectacularly in the “Circe” episode
of Ulysses. The middle-class and middle-aged Leopold Bloom and the impe-
cunious university graduate Stephen Dedalus wander through the Mabbot
Street entrance into Nighttown; the lid on the unconscious unlocks; the
box turns upside down; repressed fantasies and memories and anxieties and
desires come tumbling out into the surreal streets. The topography of the
mind superimposes on the streets of the city, and for generations, critics
have psychoanalyzed the phantoms given corporeal shape in Nighttown.52
Or they have pointed out the similarity between “Circe” and avant-garde
theater in Paris and Vienna around 1920. Walking into Nighttown is like
going into a theater, a space where one suspends disbelief and allows the
imagination to run wild. The theater patron vicariously experiments with
various identities as easily as actors change costumes and trot themselves
on stage. These two readings are nearly identical. As Harry Levin put it in
1941, “Circe” symbolically plays out a “psychic fantasy” after the fashion
of Expressionist theater.
Whether it is the id or a playhouse, Nighttown stands apart from its sur-
rounding neighborhoods, singular, bound by its suspension of moral law.
The forces that menace the middle-class psyche concentrate there, which
fascinates urban literary critics. Catherine Flynn, for instance, argues that
“Circe” exposes the web of consumer culture that captures Bloom, as the
allure of buyable objects—in this case, prostitutes—overwhelm his desires.
In a masochistic fantasy, he submits his own body to the sex worker he is
paying, literally becoming the object that he desires. According to Flynn,
Joyce is dramatizing Walter Benjamin’s cautions about the oppressive
erotics of urban consumer culture. Nighttown certainly threatens Bloom
and Stephen, who, though hardly unscathed, manage to escape back to
the safer territory of Eccles Street with their sanity, some of their money,
and their reputations. But pursuing Flynn’s line of inquiry requires us to
ignore a different power relation, not that between the mechanisms of city
and the individual psyche, but relations between distinct populations liv-
ing side-by-side within the city.
Who, really, is in thrall in Nighttown? It is not Bloom. According to Park,
one of the first questions the urban ecologists asks is, What are the elements of
which [the natural area is] composed? 53 The blocks surrounding Montgomery
Street, “Monto” in Dublin slang, were the most notorious red-light district
in Europe. The “elements” of which it is composed might be represented by
Bella Cohen, whom Joyce describes as “a massive whoremistress … dressed
in a threequarter ivory gown, fringed round the hem with tasselled selvedge,”
with heavily made-up eyes, a “sprouting moustache,” sweating and full-
nosed.54 Joyce based his character on a real-life woman he almost certainly
met when he patronized Dublin’s brothels. She began life as Ellen Charlton,
born in England around 1851. By a remarkable bit of detective work, John
Simpson has discovered quite a lot about her—probably more than Joyce him-
self knew. By her mid-twenties, she was housekeeper for an Irishman named
Patrick Moore in Upper Mercer Street, a slum on the south side of the Liffey.
Moore was married; Charlton was his mistress and had two children with him.
In 1877, Moore drank himself to death, leaving Charlton the children, their
house, and another property in Cumberland Street, both “disorderly” houses,
which was the euphemism for a boarding house cum brothel. Dublin’s pecu-
liar economics encouraged brothels: according to Charlton herself, renting to
“respectable” clients in a slum yielded £15 per year, while populating one’s
house with disreputable women could yield as much as £50. Though she
was a landlady, these houses were slum dwellings, and we must not mistake
Charlton for a well-off woman. Strangely enough, we know that she had blue
eyes, stood five feet one inch tall, and that she weighed exactly 228 pounds:
the police took these measurements when they arrested her for possessing a
stolen fur coat. She served two months hard labor in Grangegorman Female
Prison. By 1883, she had moved to Irishtown, where the thirty-two-year-old
woman was arrested once for drunkenness and damaging property, and
another time for serving porter to her tenants without a license. In that case,
several clergymen complained about her boarding house, and the magistrate,
a Mr. Cullen, was particularly miffed because he thought “this was a very dif-
ferent case from a disorderly house in an already disreputable neighborhood.”
A brothel in Irishtown was “liable to corrupt persons near it.” The unspoken
implication was that it was all right to corrupt people in other parts of the
city, or perhaps that in certain parts of the city everyone was already corrupt.
Charlton got the message, and she escaped another sentence of hard labor by
relocating to an “already disreputable neighborhood” on the north side of the
Liffey: Monto. For the next twenty or so years, she kept several houses in suc-
cession, all of them on the north side, where we find her in “Circe.”55 In other
words, the city’s economic forces encouraged her to keep prostitutes, and the
criminal justice system channeled them into Monto. The police and municipal
courts did the dirty work, but “influential members of Dublin’s business and
political classes” pressured the police. Though brothels were officially illegal
everywhere, those who made and executed public policy tolerated them in
Monto in order to prevent prostitution elsewhere in the city.56
130 J. P. KELLY
Joyce did not expose these forces at work. Probably he wasn’t aware
of them. We do not have much evidence that he understood the life of
a prostitute from her point of view. The people of Monto lived grimly,
as has been well-documented by others. In one police report, we hear of
Charlton dragging one of her girls, Kate Owens, down several flights of
stairs before she “threw her down the remainder of a flight.”57 That bit
of evidence grimly contrasts Joyce’s picture of Florry, Zoe, and Kitty, the
three women who parade their “promiscuous nakedness” before Bloom’s
discerning eye. During the display, Bloom notices that one of the women
“seems sad,” which almost glimpses the reality behind the brothel’s
false front. But caution in the guise of his father, who sounds not unlike
Charles Baudelaire and Walter Benjamin, shouts, “Hoax! Beware of the
flapper and the bogus mournful.”58 The tenor of this passage invites us to
laugh at the women and gives readers no other foothold by which they
might climb into sympathy with the prostitutes. And the chapter’s climax,
Bloom’s final confrontation with Bella Cohen, seduces readers into the
point of view of the middle-class patron of the brothel.
No reader is likely to sympathize with the sweating, mustachioed
madam, not even when Bloom, brandishing his middle-class powers,
threatens to drag her son, who has escaped the impoverished life of Monto,
back into the ghetto.59 Nor does the slim evidence about Joyce’s personal
attitudes suggest sympathy with poor women. His first sexual escapade,
when he was barely an adolescent, involved a “young maid servant” in his
mother’s employ. When they were discovered, Joyce laughed it off. She
was fired. The evidence of Stanislaus’s Dublin Diary indicated to Laurie
Teal, who has considered the issue more thoroughly than anyone else,
that “[f]or Joyce, visiting prostitutes was part of an aesthetic, philosophi-
cal, and political ‘revaluation of all values.’” Their frank sexuality in the
midst of repressed Catholic culture helped express and enact his aesthetic
rebellion. “Joyce,” Teal insists, “identifie[d] with the prostitute,” thus
liberating himself from oppressive forces.60 But surely someone like the
young, feisty, university-educated James Joyce can have “identified” with
prostitutes only by ignoring the reality of their urban experience. Such
an imaginative gesture is pure fantasy: he identified with a middle-class
notion of the prostitute. Joyce’s attitude matured when he saw the whores
of Paris: as he declared in a letter to Nora, prostitutes no longer intoxi-
cated him with the liquor of rebellion. It is not clear what they came to
represent though it was something less pleasant, and they mattered only
in relation to what they could or could not give him. They were still
s ymbols. Joyce betrayed no sympathy for the women entrapped by the life
of the sex worker.
For all its sophistication, the Joyce Industry exhibits the same lack of
curiosity. Garry Leonard, for instance, imagines that Stephen Dedalus’s
patronage of a prostitute exemplifies the experience of the “modern urban
man,” who confronts the consumer culture that is the modern city.61
Leaning on Simmel, Benjamin, and Jean Baudrillard, Leonard fails to con-
sider how very few people actually conformed to this type of metropolitan.
“Modern urban man” obviously does not refer to women; nor does it
refer to most of the men who lived in the modern city. Similarly, Austin
Briggs’s discussion of “Circe” very convincingly explains how the theater,
like the brothel, is “an erotic site.”62 But he does not much consider, erotic
for whom? “Bella’s house,” Briggs notes, “offers a better life for a woman
than the quick-turnover cribs and a far better life than do the streets.”63
This testimony is sustained by Ulick O’Connor 64 and Joseph V. O’Brien,65
as well as by Oliver St. John Gogarty. Similarly, the historian Maria Luddy
gives us a pretty full and grim picture of the misery of the prostitute
who lived under bushes and bridges and in earthen caves burrowed into
ditches.66 Cohen’s women had it better than these. But for Zoe, Florry
and Kitty, the brothel was hardly an “erotic site.” To think of it as such is
a trick of conscience by which the middle class escapes its own culpabil-
ity in producing and perpetuating Monto. It indemnifies Joyce, Stephen,
Bloom, even O’Connor and Gogarty from the charge of exploitation.
Not that I urge readers to identify with the brothel-keeper, Ellen
Charlton, who seems to have been more sinning than sinned against. But
the forces that pushed poor young women to work for her ought to have
troubled Joyce’s conscience. Destitution drove most prostitutes into their
profession, and Monto was so poor that the working-class people living
nearby scorned it. In the seven most notorious tenement houses lived
thirty-eight “families,” most consisting of up to five or more women liv-
ing in one room. Illiteracy rates were as high as 97 percent. Court records
show that sexual assaults were common. Women faced the now-notorious
danger of the Magdalene Asylums. Gonorrhea and syphilis were constant
worries; so were their cures in the “lock” hospitals. Margot Norris is a rare
Joycean who calls attention to these realities, discussing syphilis and other
tribulations that prostitutes were liable to suffer, including imprisonment
in the Westmoreland National Lock Hospital, and in doing so, she dis-
credits Bloom’s view of Monto.67 But she is an exception proving the rule.
Few critics who follow Benjamin see life from the poor’s perspective.68
132 J. P. KELLY
Benjamin, who saw Paris’s prostitutes through the eyes of Charles

Baudelaire, imagined a “carnivore hunting its prey.” Quoting Baudelaire
and George Simmel, Benjamin reiterated the notion that the prostitute’s
vigilant eye is “like the wild animal.” His Arcades Project consistently pres-
ents prostitutes as part of the urban machinery with which the psyche of
modern man interacts, much the same way as the poor figure in Simmel.
“Prostitution flares up in the streets,” Benjamin quotes Baudelaire, “Like
an anthill opening its outlets; … Like an enemy bent on a surprise attack;
… Like a worm that takes its food in man.”69 All of these images reflect
middle-class attitudes evident in the historical record of Ireland, which
was obsessed with containing the contagion of prostitutes.70
Not just the prostitute. The rag-picker, the taxi-driver, the poor in
general are part of the city’s machine, figuring in both Baudelaire and
Benjamin as part of the inhumane environment with which the metro-
politan must contend.71 Consider Joyce’s descriptions of the Monto’s
other denizens. Stunted men, a pygmy woman swinging “on a rope slung
between the railings,” “a form sprawled against a dustbin” with “grinding,
growling teeth,” “famished snaggletusks of an elderly bawd,” a crouching
“gnome,” a “crone” making back “for her lair,” a crawling child, a wailing
child, a screaming woman, a roaring man, a “slut” combing “out the tatts
from the hair of a scrofulous child.”72 All together, the nightmare cityscape
of “Circe” is populated by a dirty, slightly scary, animalistic horde, at best
semi-civilized and semi-hostile, the natives of an exotic foreign territory.
Yet they all seem to belong in Nighttown. Nothing in Ulysses tips readers
off to the forces that created and sustain Monto.
What this means is that Joyce used Monto the way Joseph Conrad used
the Congo in Heart of Darkness, and the point I’m making is similar to
Chinua Achebe’s severe criticism of that novel. Joyce may not have been
a thorough-going racist, but he did express the bias of privilege. Monto
figured in his imagination as the site of sexual license, the place where the
bourgeois male might indulge his repressed impulses, and this geographic
image of the poor justified such policies as those exercised by Magistrate
Cullen. Liam Lanigan’s urban ecocritical study of “Circe” draws the same
conclusion: by containing prostitution in Monto, city planners reduce
prostitutes “to silence and invisibility … and in turn [render] the space
they occupy as an ideologically blank canvas onto which the repressed
desires and fears of the male population can be surreptitiously projected,
and then disregarded.”73 Lanigan even goes so far as to assert that “certain
passages of ‘Circe’ … constitute a recapitulation of the principles of urban
planning as they were constituted at the time Joyce was writing.”74 Those
passages provide for the systematic exploitation of poor women.
One might protest that Bloom’s transient sympathy for the sex worker
(to take one example) is Joyce’s way of tipping off the reader, letting us
know that there is a second perspective in Ulysses. Perhaps Joyce intended
his readers to recoil from the middle class’s unsympathetic way of imagin-
ing the poor. In fact, Margot Norris makes this very case, suggesting that
several details revealed about the prostitutes encourage readers to distance
themselves from Bloom’s point of view. Teal also thinks that Joyce, while
using prostitutes as symbols of the mechanized, alienating, commodity-
fetishizing modern city, presents “prostitutes as real people for the first
time.”75 Even Lanigan concludes hopefully that the readers’ confusion in
“Circe” calls “into question the vocabulary of all [urban] planning dis-
course … and also provides a blueprint for vocalizing the true complexity
of the relationship between all of a city’s parts, however marginal they may
at times appear to be.”76 They may be right, but I fear that our admiration
for Joyce, who turned out to be on the right side of so many crucial moral
issues, clouds our judgment. A much more plausible way of accounting
for this lack of perspective in Joyce’s writing is that it reflects Joyce’s own
imagination. And I fear that the Joyce Industry, reluctant to find Joyce on
the wrong side of any moral issue, has been complicit for a very long time.
Those critics who take seriously Joyce’s avowal of socialism seem to under-
mine my sweeping indictment of the Joyce Industry. The socialist Joyce must
have understood the plight of Dublin’s poor, sympathized with them, and
wanted to promote changes to their material conditions. This school of criti-
cism might have begun as early as Dominic Manganiello’s Joyce’s Politics in
1980, but it was James Fairhall’s 1993 James Joyce and the Question of History
that fully revealed to Joyceans the inescapable sea of poverty that surrounded
middle-class Dublin writers circa 1900.77 Consciousness of this poverty lurks
in the background of most studies of Joyce’s nationalism, and occasionally,
it comes to the foreground, as it does in Andrew Gibson’s The Strong Spirit,
which is probably the best book on Joyce and Irish politics in the twenty years
since Fairhall’s. Gibson is absolutely persuasive when he proves to us that the
“paralysis” that was in Joyce’s mind when he conceived and wrote Dubliners
corresponds to a “paralysis, supineness, [and] inertia” attributed by Sinn
Fein’s United Irishman to the “spiritless middle classes” of Ireland.78 Gibson
suggests that Joyce’s socialism was even more advanced than James Connolly
(whose “thought was to some extent weakened by its abstractions”),79 link-
ing him to the writings of a union organizer Joyceans have probably never
134 J. P. KELLY
heard of—Michael O’Lehane. O’Lehane, according to Gibson, exhibits the

same, unromanticized, “rooted sense” of the real lives of poor people that so
interested Joyce.80 Influenced by “socialist and Labour discourses” as much as
by “[n]ationalist discourses,” Joyce wanted to draw “attention to economic
indicators, to poverty, to very small economic differences as well as large
ones.”81 Yet, for all of this insight, Gibson does not analyze how Joyce actually
treats the poor in his texts. Perhaps sensing a dearth of such characters, Gibson
resorts to a very questionable maneuver: if most of Joyce’s characters “do not
exactly seem working-class,” he reasons, “in Ireland the boundary between
working class and petite bourgeoisie was often blurred.”82 That statement
precedes an analysis of the characters in “Ivy Day in the Committee Room,”
as if the impecunious Henchy, O’Connor, Lyons, Hynes, Father Keon, and
Crofton might approximate lower-class Dubliners. No matter the thinness of
their wallets, these characters cannot be put in the same class as old man Jack
and the boy who brings in the bottles. Their education erects a high bound-
ary between them and Dublin’s true poor. In his final analysis, Gibson goes
no further than elucidating Joyce’s conscious political views. He doesn’t really
consider how Joyce represented the poor in his texts, whether those repre-
sentations typify the unconscious attitudes of people living in the vicinity of
Belvedere College, or how those representations were likely to affect preju-
diced Irish middle-class readers. Gibson teaches us that by reading Dubliners,
Magistrate Cullen might be reminded of the United Irishman’s whinge about
middle-class paralysis and inertia. But would Joyce’s work change his view of
prostitutes? Would it keep him from chasing Ellen Charlton across the river to
Monto? Criticism has not asked these questions.
For all of Bloom’s admired powers of parallactic vision and Joyce’s
justly-admired deconstruction of anti-Semitism, Dubliners and Ulysses wear
the blinders of class prejudice. Nighttown exists only to be the disorderly
playground of orderly men. When the men are done playing, they leave the
whores in Monto. Arm-in-arm, john and reader flâneur their way back to
Eccles Street.
Notes
1. Stanislaus Joyce, My Brother’s Keeper: James Joyce’s Early Years (New York:
Viking, 1958), 62–63.
2. Stanislaus Joyce to James Joyce, Dublin, October 10, 1905, in Letters of
James Joyce. Vol. 2, ed. Richard Ellmann (New York: The Viking Press),
115.

4. Greg Winston, “Britain’s Wild West: Joyce’s Encounter with the ‘Apache
Chief,’” James Joyce Quarterly 46, no. 2 (2009): 219–238.
5. James Joyce, Dubliners: Text, Criticism, Notes, ed. Robert Scholes and
A. Walton Litz (New York: Penguin Books, 1976), 21–22.
6. Vivien Igoe, James Joyce’s Dublin Houses and Nora Barnacle’s Galway
(Dublin: Lilliput Press, 2007) 61–64.
7. Dublin Historic Industry Database, Geologic Survey of Ireland (Carrig
Conservation: 2011), 8.
9. Ibid., 93.
10. James Joyce, Dubliners: An Illustrated Edition with Annotations, ed. John
Wyse Jackson and Bernard McGinley (New York: St. Martin’s, 1993)
14–15, notes a and l. Jackson and McGinley’s edition of Dubliners situates
the terminus of the boys’ journey at Irishtown, well beyond Ringsend,
though I can see no reason why we should think they have gone so far.
11. Robert E. Park and Ernest W. Burgess and Roderick D. McKenzie, The
City (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967), 40–43.
12. Ibid., 63–79.
13. See Ernest W. Burgess and also Patsy Healy. For a contemporary version of
Burgess’s migration theory, see Robert Fishman’s “The Fifth Migration.”
14. Georg Simmel, “The Metropolis and Mental Life,” in Neighborhood, City,
and Metropolis: An Integrated Reader in Urban Sociology, ed. Robert
Gutman and David Popenoe (New York: Random House, 1970), 777.
15. Richard Lehan, The City in Literature (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1998), 6 and 71. Lehan does mention the Chicago School tangen-
tially, in connection to writers like Theodore Dreiser.
16. The essayists in this volume do not acknowledge their debt. Michael

Harding is the one critic who stands outside this tradition. He roots his
work in the work of Lewis Mumford, the American social, literary, and
urban critic who questioned the nature/human binary.
17. Enda Duffy, The Subaltern “Ulysses,” (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 1994), 6 and 91.
18. Christine Cusick, “‘Clacking Along the Concrete Pavement’: Economic
Isolation and the Bricolage of Place in James Joyce’s ‘Dubliners,’” in Eco-
Joyce: The Environmental Imagination of James Joyce, ed. Robert Brazeau
and Derek Gladwin (Cork: Cork University Press, 2014), 163.
Joyce. Vol. 1, ed. Richard Ellmann and Stuart Gilbert (New York: The
Viking Press), 62–63. See also Richard Ellmann, James Joyce (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1982), 208. In the midst of writing Dubliners,
Joyce contemplated another volume that would analyze rural Ireland, a
study called Provincials, though nothing came of the notion.
136 J. P. KELLY
20. Liam Lanigan, James Joyce, Urban Planning and Irish Modernism: Dublins
of the Future (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 3.
21. I should point out that these critics concede that some aspects of urban life
contribute to the improvement of the individual. Lanigan explains that
some critics position Joyce as an international modernist by suggesting the
problem in Dublin is a lack of urbanization. Similarly, Harding does not
always view the city as harmful to the psyche. “While the city is certainly
home to many forms of disintegration,” he notes, “we should consider the
possibilities it also provides as a site of liberation from the very forces that
would seem to crush the individual” (13 and 59). Nevertheless, his ulti-
mate interpretation of Dubliners conforms to these familiar terms of paral-
ysis/liberation. Hye-Joon Yoon’s 2012 book, Metropolis and Experience,
similarly treats Joyce and the city.
22. Simmel, “The Metropolis and Mental Life,” 778–79.
23. Walter Benjamin, The Writer of Modern Life: Essays on Charles Baudelaire
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006), 60.
25. For a discussion of Joyce’s leftist critics, see Jeffrey Segall, Joyce in America:
Cultural Politics and the Trials of “Ulysses,” especially chapters 1 and 3.
26. Fairhall lifted this definition from Simon Estok’s “Shakespeare and

Ecocriticism: An Analysis of ‘Home’ and ‘Power’ in King Lear” (16–17).
Brazeau and Gladwin’s introduction to Eco-Joyce does urge critics to pay
attention to “urbanism, gender, resource management, contested land-
scapes in colonial zones, Darwinism, environmental justice and issues of
space and place in various geographies,” which should nudge ecocriticism
away from the bias of urban criticism. But few of the critics they selected
break out of the ecocritical bias, not even those under the promising
rubric, “Joyce and the Urban Environment.” For example, Margot
Norris’s and Brandon Kershner’s essays, though admirable ecocritical
studies, both presume the same binary between the natural and the urban
worlds (see, for example, 113–114 and 135).
27. See, for example, James Collins, et al.; and J. Breuste, H. Feldmann, and
O. Uhlmann’s collection of essays, Urban Ecology.
28. Pamela Curtis Swallow, The Remarkable Life and Career of Ellen Swallow
Richards, Pioneer in Science and Technology (Hoboken: John Wiley &
Sons, 2014), 46, 79, and 93.
29. Frederick Edward Clements, Research Methods in Ecology (Lincoln:

University Publishing Co., 1905), 16.
30. Park and Burgess and McKenzie, The City, 63–64.
31. In their textbook, Gutman and Popenoe define urban ecology as the study
of the economic, biological, social, and cultural “factors determining spa-
tial location.” Robert Gutman and David Popenoe, ed., Neighborhood,
City, and Metropolis: An Integrated Reader in Urban Sociology. (New York:
Random House, 1970), 392.
32. Since Craig Calhoun edited the collection Social Theory and the Politics of
Identity, a huge volume of sociological studies have been published in this
area. Craig Calhoun, ed., Social Theory and the Politics of Identity (Oxford:
Blackwell, 1994).
33. Park and Burgess and McKenzie, The City, 3.
Joyce. Vol. 2, 137.
36. Giovanna Sonda and Claudio Coletta and Francesco Gabbi, ed., Urban
Plots, Organizing Cities (Burlington: Ashgate, 2010), 1–3.
37. Barbara Mennel, Cities and Cinema (New York: Routledge, 2008), 15.
38. Other notable map-oriented books include Jack McCarthy and Danis
Rose’s Joyce’s Dublin: A Walking Guide to “Ulysses”; the Norton Critical
Edition of Dubliners, edited by Margot Norris; and Ian Gunn and Clive
Hart’s James Joyce’s Dublin: A Topographical Guide to the Dublin of “Ulysses.”
Several online sites have begun to apply new geographical information
applications, such as Jasmine Mulliken’s The Mapping Dubliners Project
sponsored by Oklahoma State University; Gerry Carlin and Mair Evans’s
“Ulysses on Google Maps”; and Boston College’s Walking “Ulysses”:
Joyce’s Dublin Today, compiled by Joseph Nugent. For an early assess-
ment of how new technologies are revolutionizing geography, see Harvey
J. Miller and Elizabeth A. Wentz’s “Representation and Spatial Analysis in
Geographic Information Systems.”
39. See Michael Bennett and David Teague’s The Nature of Cities: Ecocriticism
and Urban Environments and Lawrence Buell’s The Future of Environ
mental Criticism: Environmental Crisis and Literary Imagination.
40. Sonda, Coletta, and Gabbi, Urban Plots, 1–3.
41. Greg Winston, “‘Aquacities of Thought and Language’: the Political

Ecology of Water in Ulysses,” in Eco-Joyce: The Environmental Imagination
of James Joyce, ed. Robert Brazeau and Derek Gladwin (Cork: Cork
42. Lanigan, Dublins of the Future, 128.
43. For a comprehensive study of the poor neighborhoods of Dublin, see
Jacinta Prunty, Dublin Slums, 1800–1925: a Study in Urban Geography
(Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 1999).
44. Park and Burgess and McKenzie, The City, 73–79.
138 J. P. KELLY
45. Raymond Williams, “The Metropolis and the Emergence of Modernism,”

in Unreal City: Urban Experience in Modern European Literature and Art,
ed. Edward Timms and David Kelley (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1985).
Williams ascribes the evolution of a new culture (modernism) to the adapta-
tion of one population (the middle class) to a changed environment (the
invasion of poor laborers from the countryside). What we call “modern”
art, according to Williams, is the cultural expression of a middle-class
neighborhood, like this one in “An Encounter,” when surrounded by
neighborhoods of “ragged” people.
46. Joseph V. O’Brien, Dear, Dirty Dublin: a City in Distress, 1899–1916
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982), 58. Changes in real estate
values were the main mechanism of such changes in neighborhoods, and
so the main anxiety would be if a new institution, like a library, would
increase or decrease the price of nearby property.
47. Earl Ingersoll, “The Psychic Geography of Joyce’s Dubliners,” New

Hibernia Review 6 (Winter 2002): 99. See also, Michael Seidel, Epic
Geography: James Joyce’s “Ulysses” (Princeton: University of Princeton
Press, 1976). Ingersoll builds his reading on Michael Seidel’s.
48. Department of Agriculture and Food. Strategic Development Plan for the
Irish Dairy Processing Sector. Nantwich: Promar International, 2003, 114.
49. “Milk and Dairies Bill,” supplement, The British Medical Journal (1909),
368–69.
50. Ordinance Survey Ireland website provides a fascinating, interactive, his-
torical map of all of Ireland, which allows for the selection of such features
as factories, forges, distilleries, gas works, etc. Unfortunately, it does not
map dairies.
51. See, for example, Judith Walkowitz, City of Dreadful Delight: Narratives of
Sexual Danger in Late Victorian London (18) and Timothy Carens,
Outlandish English Subjects in the Victorian Novel. Joyce here is not dis-
similar from the Parisian writers like Dumas and Balzac who invoke
American Indians to describe the dangers of the city (see Benjamin 72–73).
52. In an early guidebook, Stuart Gilbert remarked that Bloom’s “inchoate
desires [and] obscure perversions … caper, gibbering, about the brothel
parlour” (James Joyce’s “Ulysses”: A Study (312)). Harry Blamires explains
that the chapter personifies “the spiritual and mental forces at work in
man’s inner life” (159). Mark Shechner’s Joyce in Nighttown: A
Psychoanalytic Inquiry into Ulysses is the best example, but this way of read-
ing the episode has become pretty ubiquitous. See also Declan Kiberd,
“Ulysses” and Us: The Art of Everyday Living and Stanley Sultan, The
Argument of “Ulysses.” Certainly, the approach corresponds to Joyce’s con-
scious intentions: as more than one critic has pointed out, many of the
fantasies in “Circe” come straight out of Krafft-Ebing’s Psychopathia
Sexualis (see, for example, Teal 156).

5
54. Joyce, Ulysses, 429.
55. “Bella Cohen at No 82 (not 81),” John Simpson, James Joyce Online Notes,
accessed March 21, 2015, http://www.jjon.org/jioyce-s-people/
madams/cohen. This fact and the subsequent details offered here were
uncovered by John Simpson and published on the James Joyce Online Notes
website. Simpson argues persuasively that records regarding Charlton and
one Ellen Cannell are all the same woman, Ellen Cohen the brothel keeper.
Whether he is right or wrong is irrelevant to my argument, which concerns
only the type of person who lived in Monto.
56. For a full discussion of these processes of selection, see Lanigan 182–189
and Greg Winston, Joyce and Militarism, especially chapter 5, “Barracks
and Brothels” (189–235).
57. See Simpson. For the history of Monto, see Maurice Curtis, To Hell or
Monto: The Story of Dublin’s Most Notorious Districts; John Finegan, Story
of Monto; Maria Luddy, Prostitution and Irish Society, 1800–1940. Luddy
identifies Bella Cohen as Becky Cooper (34).
58. Joyce, Ulysses, 418.
59. Joyce, Ulysses, 476–477.
60. Laurie Teal, “‘Sellers of Illusion’: Prostitution and the Discourses of

Modernism” (dissertation, Brown University, 1993).
61. Garry Leonard, “The City, Modernism, and Aesthetic Theory in A Portrait
of the Artist as a Young Man,” NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction 29, no. 1
(1995): 97.
62. Austin Briggs, “Whorehouse/Playhouse: The Brothel as Theater in the
‘Circe’ Chapter of Ulysses,” Journal of Modern Literature 26, no. 1 (2002):
46.
63. Briggs, “Whorehouse/Playhouse,” 50–54.
64. Ulick O’Connor, The Times I’ve Seen: Oliver St. John Gogarty, A Biography
(New York: Ivan Obolensky, 1963), 56.
65. O’Brien, Dear, Dirty Dublin, 190.
66. Maria Luddy, Prostitution and Irish Society, 1800–1940 (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2007), 41–75.
67. Margot Norris, “Disenchanting Enchantment: the Theatrical Brothel of
‘Circe’,” in Ulysses: En-gendered Perspectives: Eighteen New Essays on the
Episodes, ed. Kimberly J. Devlin and Marilyn Reizbaum (Columbia:
University of South Carolina Press, 1999), 239–40.
68. I should point out that Norris believes Joyce meant for readers to resist
sympathy with Bloom’s point of view, that he intended readers to remem-
ber “that the women who serve as the pretext for pornography are work-
ing women caught in a bad business.” Ibid., 241.
69. Benjamin, Essays on Charles Baudelaire, 87.
140 J. P. KELLY
70. Luddy, Prostitution and Irish Society, 124–56.

71. Benjamin, Essays on Charles Baudelaire, 41 and 54–55 and 207.
72. Joyce, Ulysses, 350–51.
73. Lanigan, Dublins of the Future, 197.
74. Lanigan, Dublins of the Future, 197. For an account of prostitution in
contemporary Ireland, see Paul Reynolds, Sex in the City: The Prostitution
Racket in Ireland (London: Pan Books, 2003).
75. Teal, “‘Sellers of Illusion,’” 167 and 160. Teal holds that prostitution sym-
bolizes romantic ideals in A Portrait and shifts toward urban mechaniza-
tion in Ulysses, where the brothel exemplifies art in the age of mechanical
reproduction.
76. Lanigan, Dublins of the Future, 202–3.
77. My own, 1998, Our Joyce: From Outcast to Icon is among those works very
largely dependent on Fairhall and yet largely blind to Joyce’s representa-
tion of the poor.
2013), 40. Part of Gibson’s achievement consists of the precision with
which he measures this shift in cultural mood, which seemed to grip
Dubliners beginning in November 1903.
79. Ibid., 51.
80. Ibid.
81. Ibid., 46.
82. Ibid.
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CHAPTER 8
Clashing Cultures in “Counterparts”:

Navigating among Print, Printing, and Oral
Narratives in Turn-of-the-Century Dublin
Miriam O’Kane Mara
The only phenomenon with which writing has always been concomitant is
the creation of cities and empires, that is the integration of large numbers
of individuals into a political system, and their grading into castes or classes.
Levi Strauss, Tristes Tropiques
James Joyce’s “Counterparts” narrates a Dublin man, Farrington, losing

his footing at work, leisure, and home. David Lloyd and Bernard Benstock
frame this dissolution as one that is inflected by media shifts between
oral and literate cultures.1 Belinda McKeon’s rewriting of James Joyce’s
“Counterparts” in Dubliners 100 intensifies the focus upon media shifts
by reframing the protagonist’s conflict as one between a Joycean scholar’s
literate training and the pull of an increasingly electrate culture. McKeon’s
reworking hinges on conflicting values between electronic practice and
print culture assumptions. Such a focus in the rewriting highlights parallel
tensions between literate culture practice and oral culture assumptions in
Joyce’s original “Counterparts.” It invites a return to the original and
M. O. Mara (*)
Department of English, Arizona State University, Glendale, AZ, USA
e-mail: miriam.mara@ndsu.edu

DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-39336-0_8
146 M. O. MARA
uncovers some of the finer nuances of Farrington’s struggle as linked to

not only a broad cultural shift to writing but also one that is destabilized by
the tools and roles of mechanical print culture. As the story progresses, the
protagonist loses his ability to navigate and balance oral and literate forms.
The disturbance of new media technologies disrupts Farrington’s ability
to flourish in a highly literate world, and readers must watch his failed
attempts to integrate oral culture from the residual orality in Irish culture
and the damaged orality of the public houses into the literate environment
of the workplace. Yet, every attempt reminds readers that Farrington and
all Dubliners must negotiate not only just chirographic culture but also
a print-based world. The story’s attention to sound and aural qualities,
the ghostlike presence of the typewriting machine, and the attention to
disparate communication modes in the representation of oral and literate
cultures delineate how print technologies dislocate parts of Irish identity,
creating paralysis in characters who cannot negotiate media shifts.
While a number of critics attend to the orality in Joyce’s later work,
especially Ulysses and Finnegans Wake,2 and a few, including David Lloyd,
see Farrington’s propensity to seek the oral culture of the public house,3
my study of “Counterparts” identifies the irruption of print culture tech-
nologies and media into Farrington’s carefully balanced literate and oral
existence. Such analysis highlights the effects of media on the production
of texts and the contexts around such textual production. A close analysis
of the story reveals how typewriters, both the machines and the women
who used them, infiltrate the office where Farrington works, thus upset-
ting the uneasy balance between oral and print cultures that Farrington
and the city of Dublin have constructed. The story appears to focus on
aural quality and the temporal limits of sound in contradistinction to the
spatial presence of text.
In Gregory Ulmer’s systemization of literacy, orality, and electracy, the
mode of orality inhabits narrative, while literacy works through argument,
“the practices of literate logic, including the definition, the syllogism, and
other forms and procedures invented by Aristotle.”4 Ong also notes that
“sparsely linear or analytic thought and speech is an artificial creation,
structured by the technology of writing.”5 Denis Donoghue maintains that
“repetition is its [orality] convention, formulaic narration a practice of its
genre.”6 Joyce’s story foregrounds those modal oppositions, as Farrington
remains unable to garner a convincing argument about Alleyne’s unfair-
ness, for example. Instead, he relies upon creation, narration, and the
retelling of stories, especially the story of his ill- or well-timed insult to
CLASHING CULTURES IN “COUNTERPARTS” 147
Mr. Alleyne. This repetition of narrative is the one space in which Farrington
succeeds, garnering laughter and grudging admiration from his drink-
ing buddies; however, this success finds little value in a colonized culture,
increasingly dominated by literate values. Unpacking the Dubliners story,
“Counterparts” reveals the paralysis of characters like Farrington, mired in
the repetitive and mnemonic orality that cannot survive the networks of an
always-changing, literate city.
In the first sentence of Joyce’s “Counterparts,” communication and
sound waves combine to announce the importance of aurality. While the
first sentence appears to lead with emotion, it rather leads with the rep-
resentation of acoustic sensation linked to those emotions. The narrator
claims, “The bell rang furiously and, when Miss Parker went to the tube,
a furious voice called out in a piercing North of Ireland accent.”7 Each of
the emotion words modifies a sound description, creating a connection
between them. Even the bell represents a type of oral communication,
because its ringing conveys information to the office inhabitants. Like the
bell, the disembodied voice too relays a message, both with language and
with tone, in this case full of fury. The description of Mr. Allyene’s voice as
furious and the focus on his unpleasant accent suggest some impediment
in his oral abilities. In this opening sentence, sound and speech dominate,
establishing the importance of sound and speech and instigating the oppo-
sition with literate print practices.
By reminding us that Alleyne’s voice “called out,”8 the text reminds us
that sound waves bring an audience together. Walter Ong explains that
sound waves are heard by all the people within a range and “whereas sight
situates the observer outside what he views, at a distance, sound pours into
the hearer,”9 […] “the auditory ideal, by contrast, is harmony, a putting
together.”10 While the inhabitants of Mr. Alleyne’s office are united in
experiencing the sound of negative emotions, the whole office joins in an
understanding that Mr. Alleyne wishes to speak to Farrington. Of course,
Mr. Alleyne’s order, “Send Farrington here!”11 has already enveloped
and entered into the hearers in the office, connecting the three syllables
of sound that represent Farrington to the high-pitched fury of Alleyne’s
voice rather than the calm description of a writing man. The spoken words
and the sense of sound predominate. Of course, readers are not actually
hearing the sound, merely reading written words describing it, but the
text recreates sound quality.
Yet, two sentences later, the strong emotion and the aural force of the
first sentences shift to blandness, isolation, and writing. The story shifts
148 M. O. MARA
attention from purely oral communication to describe literate technologies,

and the tensions of oral culture and literate culture present in the first para-
graph. The narrator relays how “Miss Parker returned to her machine, say-
ing to a man who was writing at a desk, ‘Mr Alleyne wants you upstairs.’”12
The first description of Farrington portrays a man using penmanship skills
in contradistinction to Miss Parker and her typewriter, implying a balance
between the two characters and a similar balance between their relative
modes of writing: typewriting and penmanship. Importantly, although we
hear another voice (Alleyne) utter his name, before that description, this
first picture of Farrington remains neutral and productive. No details of
his personality or appearance connect to this chirographic role. Rather the
text only allows that he writes, he is currently writing, and he is a man.
In this first representation, Farrington’s entire identity resides in the writ-
ing he carries out. The identity of “a man” connects quite clearly to the
identity of a writer, a wielder of the pen. Until he speaks “blast him,” we
do not get the unflattering portrait of Farrington’s “great bulk” or his
“hanging face” or the “bulged forward” eyes with “the whites of them
[…] dirty.”13 If we take the image of a man writing at a desk as the ulti-
mate image of literate culture, it seems that as the story begins, Farrington
functions as the representative of literacy.
Friedrich Kittler reveals the attitudes that hover in the background of
“Counterparts” where “the clerks, office helpers and poet-apprentices of
the nineteenth century, who were exclusively male, had invested so much
pride in their laboriously trained handwriting as to overlook Remington’s
innovation for seven years.”14 Farrington too, appears on the surface to be
completely unfazed by the potential of Miss Parker’s machine, but closer
inspection of the text reveals his rising distress as connected to the oral
sounds of the typewriter. The text of Joyce’s story also seems to overlook
typewriters, as the word is never uttered by a character or the narrator, but
rather the presence of the machine, as Joyce names it, haunts the story,
creating the technological disruption that destabilizes the truce between
oral and literate cultures.
The new “Counterparts” by McKeon narrates a similar instability in
Elizabeth’s failure to balance the literate culture with electrate interlopers
like social media. Chris Power’s Guardian review of McKeon’s new
“Counterparts” suggests that “in both stories, an ill-considered remark has
job-threatening consequences,”15 which downplays the digital nature of
the protagonist Elizabeth’s “remark.” She, indeed, makes an ill-considered
remark, but unlike Farrington, she aims not to insult her employer nor
even to weigh in on the story at hand, but rather to make points with the
Dublin twitterati by undercutting a bully. She never intends the tweet to
be taken as a negative appraisal on the actual search for the young girl,
but the hashtag she includes connects her personal cut to a Tweetstar,
who has a large following, to the larger issue of this girl’s disappearance.
N. Katherine Hayles argues that “When texts are translated into electronic
environments, the attempt to define a work as an immaterial verbal con-
struct, already problematic for print, opens a Pandora’s box of additional
complexities and contradictions.”16 Farrington absolutely attempts to be
witty and insult his supervisor without openly using disparaging language,
but Elizabeth’s remarks get pulled through the network in ways that have
little to do with her intended audience. The story’s heroes are the hashtag,
the digital linkage tool that allows searching in the twitterstream and
guarantees Elizabeth’s downfall, and the retweet, the means by which her
detractors keep the mistweet alive. Of course, the bully Mulligan’s tweet
does not include the “#findanastasia” hashtag, so that it will be difficult
for those not following the tweeted conversation to link his tweet to her
ill-fated response. Such nuances in the structure and functionality of this
social media site serve Elizabeth ill and demonstrate how electrate culture
follows different rules in ways that can harm literate practitioners.
To further illustrate ways McKeon’s story turns on media specificity,
readers only learn Elizabeth’s last name, Farrell, through the twitter-
stream, when she quotes Richie Mulligan taunting her “Christ @lizzyfar-
rell, come on, spit it out, girl! #findanangle.”17 Again the network and the
twitterstream do the heavy lifting in this narrative, providing information
that neither exposition nor dialogue gives readers. This clever use of a
tweet, to uncover the protagonist’s identity, deepens readers’ own imbri-
cation in the network of digital media that the story critiques. Perhaps, of
course, the Twitter handle “@lizzyfarrell” is a pseudonym. While Twitter
requests real names for accounts, it does not require that handles match
those real names. In the text, Twitter and the networks that carry it may
be presenting fallacious information to readers, becoming a secondary
unreliable narrator to the third person omniscient voice that recounts
Elizabeth’s collapse.
In the original “Counterparts” too, the technology of print culture
becomes the unnamed agent. The electrate culture of the new version
puts the networks of the original in stark relief. Even though the narrator
of Joyce’s story eschews naming the typewriter, readers can learn from
the footnotes that typewriters were in use, but “typewritten documents
150 M. O. MARA
were not legally binding.”18 Miss Parker thus produces documents with
less legal or financial worth than those produced by Farrington and his
scrivening counterparts in the law office. Yet, the changes augured by Miss
Parker’s machine, including the disappearance of scriveners, are presaged
by the typewriter’s omnipresence in the first half of the story. The narrator
notes how “the man listened to the clicking of the machine for a few min-
utes and then set work to finish his copy.”19 The sound of the typewriter,
still named only the machine by the narrator, distracts Farrington from
his writing task. His endeavors to create copies of the documents seem at
odds with the clicking sounds emanating from the typewriter. Of course,
the aural nature of the clicks harkens back to an oral culture while simul-
taneously disrupting it with print technology.
Once readers have a vague image of Farrington and his identity as man
and writer, that status begins to get undercut by the text. Indeed “The
man muttered Blast him! under his breath and pushed back his chair to
stand up. When he stood up he was tall and of great bulk.”20 Farrington’s
first orality is “muttered” under his breath, as if he is not versed in oral
culture. In fact, the words also comprise a curse, suggesting perhaps, lim-
ited facility with spoken communication. Yet, cursing is in fact a recurring
factor in oral culture, in which it had almost incantatory power. In the
first few sentences of the story, the tensions between orality and literacy
become apparent. Walter Ong admits that the even in the late twentieth
century “Ireland [was] a country which in every region preserves massive
residual orality.”21 In the early part of the century, the oral culture was less
residual and more mainstream, while print culture was decidedly press-
ing in, especially in the capital city, Dublin. This residual orality as Ong
explains involves questions or requests as threat and practitioners in oral
culture use the spoken word as deflection or weapon.22 Farrington’s “blast
him” as well as his later remarks to Alleyne fit into this framework of verbal
sparring that Ong describes.
Once Farrington has been remonstrated by Alleyne and begins to
focus on the clicking of the machine, his penmanship prowess falters. He
pushes against the literate practices that sustain his employment. The story
describes how “He returned to his desk in the lower office and counted
the sheets which remained to be copied. He took up his pen and dipped
it in the ink but he continued to stare stupidly at the last words he had
written.”23 The interruption in Farrington’s workday renders him unable
to continue participating in the literacy economy of the office. His fail-
ure to resume writing reflects his inability to thrive in the literate culture.
The narrator explains, “The evening was falling and in a few minutes they
would be lighting the gas: then he could write.”24 At this point in the
story, Farrington has no problem speaking, but he now needs darkness to
write. The text ironically connects writing and literate cultures to the dark-
ness, even though teleological formations of culture often portray them as
the way forward. As the story began, he was a man writing at a desk, long
before the dusk that he now seems to need for progress at that task. The
destabilization of Farrington’s oral and literate balance has begun.
One main difference in literacy and orality that stymies Farrington is
the temporal limitations of sounds, which Donoghue compares to the spa-
tial nature of written or printed documents, which occupy material space.
He suggests that “it follows that reality in oral society is constructed as
mainly temporal: hence its appropriate paradigm is the in and out of one’s
breathing. Temporal, dependent upon memory: reality is interpreted
as historical, it assumes a narrative form of understanding.”25 Ong too
reminds us that speech and orality remain bound by temporal limitations,
that once someone stops speaking, the words are nearly finished, and they
do not continue, while print text enters the spatial, becoming corporeal
and mobile, and in print culture, replicable.
Attention to temporality also harkens to the differing amounts of time
required to write versus that needed to speak. The difficulties of entering
into the networks of literate culture include learning the patience to pro-
duce written documents with the skill required to enter literate practice
in contradistinction to the relative ease of speaking. Despite the ability of
written text to take the spatial turn, becoming corporeal and, thus, tran-
scending the moment of speech, time limits apply to the production of
documents. In “Counterparts,” the speed of production becomes another
way the text telegraphs the future of print culture, as “the chief clerk
began to hurry Miss Parker, saying she would never have the letters typed
in time for post.”26 The text subtly reminds readers that the typewriter
creates documents much faster than copying by hand by scriveners like
Farrington. “He struggled on with his copy, but when the clock struck
five he had still fourteen pages to write.”27 Farrington’s early facility “writ-
ing at a desk” appears diminished in this passage, as he does not pen the
amount necessary to please his superior. Miss Parker and Farrington share
a mutual inability to create documents quickly enough for the speed of the
office, but that mutuality belies the actual differences in speed between the
two media forms of penmanship and typewriting. The narrative highlights
the limited speed of chirographic recreation without mention of the rela-
tive swiftness of typewriting, looming noisily in the background.
152 M. O. MARA
Farrington’s increasing nervousness causes him to attempt to bring the

oral culture of the pub with its anecdotes and jokes into his workplace,
where it does not fit as well. David Lloyd remarks upon the ways that pubs
replicate oral culture: “In practices like treating or the round system that
reflect a surviving moral economy, as well as in specific oral performances
like storytelling and banter, the non-modern pleasures of oral space con-
tinue to haunt the public house.”28 Paul Delany expands, suggesting that
“the story is a current item and an item of currency, part of the homosocial
economy’s three-sided exchange of money, drink and talk.”29 Farrington,
who fares better in the exchange of that atmosphere, responds to Alleyne
as if they were mates at the public house, battling wits. As Walter Ong
claims, “oral cultures strike literates as extraordinarily agonistic in their
verbal performance.”30 Farrington parries Alleyne’s insults to his knowl-
edge and abilities with a clever witticism as if they were verbally jousting in
the pub. In fact, the initial repartee of Farrington’s insult to Mr. Alleyne
creates a positive effect for his status. The narrator who already notes that
“Mr. Alleyne was said to be sweet on” Miss Delacour,31 also reports that
she “began to smile broadly” after hearing Farrington’s retort.32 She and
the other people who hear it become a community for a short moment.
As Ong contends, “when a speaker is addressing an audience, the mem-
bers of the audience normally become a unity, with themselves and with
the speaker.”33 Ong understands the ways that orality connects to unify-
ing community, while “writing and print isolate.”34 Nothing in his work
performance, copying the contracts and documents, earns Farrington any
sign of social approval, but his verbal parry garners positive attention, both
in the context of the office and later in the pubs. Farrington’s efforts to
return to oral culture, and his failures to succeed in the literate one, reveal
how community is losing to individuality.
Mr. Alleyne’s response to Farrington’s verbal jab reinforces the eco-
nomic hierarchy and the individual order of the workplace, ignoring
or attempting to undercut the very real communal social capital that
Farrington’s insult reaps. Earlier in the story, Alleyne willingly played the
sparring game with jabs such as “Upon my word, Farrington, you take
things easy!”35 In his insistence upon an apology or “you’ll quit the office
instanter!”36 Alleyne moves away from that deflection and tussling frame-
work or oral culture to rely upon the practices of hiring and firing that are
imbricated in literate culture.
Such practices remain individual, as workers in this office environment
negotiate for work with employers one-on-one.
As the story progresses, tensions between the verbal skill of oral culture
and the literate values of the office become increasingly apparent. He often
excels at “oral or ‘simple’ forms as the anecdote, the joke, proverb, hom-
ily, and the like, embedded in conversation.”37 Yet, after his well-timed
blow to Mr. Alleyne, Farrington thinks to himself, “could he not keep his
tongue in his cheek?”38 Even as the text seems to elevate orality, part of
Farrington’s problem is his attention to speech and his facility with story-
telling and clever insults. Although he appears comfortable in oral culture,
this ease does not explain his inability to control the reception of that
medium in the business environment of literate culture. Bernard Benstock
observes the connections of orality and failure in the story. He notes that
“Dubliners is shot through with such failed narratives, one of the most
potent that of the heavy-tongued Farrington in ‘Counterparts.’”39 By
naming Farrington “heavy-tongued,” Benstock identifies the ways that
Farrington’s orality cannot work in the increasingly literate Dublin where
he resides. Oral genres like jokes and stories, and mimicry, may garner
limited success in the underworld of pubs, but they cannot translate those
achievements into the financial realm.
Even in the communal and oral world of the pub, Farrington’s verbal
ability begins to fade, although after Farrington leaves work, much of his
evening consists of attempts to elevate himself using the practices of oral
culture. On the way to find his drinking counterparts, “he preconsidered
the terms in which he would narrate the incident to the boys,”40 plan-
ning for the best impression. As Benstock observes, “Instead of faithfully
repeating his comment, ‘I don’t think, sir, that that’s a fair question to
put to me,’ self-interest causes him to omit the word ‘sir.’”41 Farrington’s
refusal to include the honorific “sir” in his anecdote displays a lack of
honesty, to be sure, but it also portrays an understanding about story-
telling and dialogue that may ensure a better reception from his a udience.
Farrington’s anecdote continues to benefit his social standing in the pub-
lic houses, earning him praise and a drink from Nosey Flynn,42 but only
for a limited time. Despite the real ways this oral culture of the pubs
hinges on both oral ability, the gift of the gab, or blarney, it also reflects
social hierarchies outside of verbal skill. As Benstock notes, Farrington
has “a simple story to tell, of his spectacular triumph over Mr. Alleyne,
and although he primes himself for telling with a slightly titivated ver-
sion and with cash reserves to establish his base as teller, he finds the tale
taken out of his mouth by an experienced usurper, Higgins.”43 Thus,
when “the men asked him [Higgins] to give his version of it, and he did
154 M. O. MARA
so with great vivacity,”44 Farrington’s earned admiration from the fellows

begins to diminish as Higgins appropriates his tale. Importantly, the loss
of power hinges on Higgins’ connection to the workplace and to Miss
Parker,45 reminding Farrington of his inability to thrive in the increasingly
typewritten office.
Clearly, part of the tensions between oral and literate cultures stems
from the alienation of the workplace and Farrington’s low place in the
individualist hierarchy there. As Lloyd explains the pub as undercutting
capitalist networks, Mamta Chaudhry-Fryer also suggests that Farrington
is “lashing out at the powers-that-be through mimicry, which implies
inversion, parody, and laughter.”46 While Chaudhry-Fryer rightly identi-
fies Farrington’s gift of mimicry, her argument about power and games
omits the uniquely oral nature of mimicking another’s speech. The sound
qualities of tone, accent, and timing are key to effective mimicry, and
Farrington has some proficiency in this area. Yet, Chaudhry-Fryer extends
the mimicry metaphor to Farrington’s writing work, suggesting that
“even his error in copying is a subconscious form of mimicry, in which he
doubles the name Bernard.”47 By not differentiating the effects of mimicry
in orality versus its effects in written texts, Chaudhry-Fryer unwittingly
exposes the tensions in Farrington’s oral/literate conundrum. While the
impersonation of his boss infects that relationship going forward, both
that oral feat and the similar parody of his son in the final pages of the story
achieve some mastery over the spoken genre and display a level of con-
trol over speech and tone. Indeed, the first example wherein Farrington
admits “they had never pulled together from the first, he and Mr. Alleyne,
ever since the day Mr. Alleyne had overheard him mimicking his North
of Ireland accent to amuse Higgins and Miss Parker,”48 despite the blow
to his reputation with Mr. Alleyne, the impression serves to improve his
relations with both Higgins and Miss Parker. Farrington “amuse[s]” them
with his verbal prowess, building social capital and camaraderie with work-
mates. But the imitation of Bernard in the place of Bodley in his copying
presents a mistake as Chaudhry-Fryer points out.49 It signals a breakdown
in writing practice, whereas in oral practice it suggests mastery. Despite the
knowledge that Farrington’s actual scrivening tasks perform a type of imi-
tation, the repetition of “Bernard Bernard” in place of “Bernard Bodley”
suggests an over-replication that moves toward mimicry. However, the
game-like quality of the mimicry in oral contexts becomes merely failure
in a written one. Chaudhry-Fryer ignores the tensions between spoken
and written language in Farrington’s day, lumping them together as one,
but she does note that Farrington’s attempts to compete or acquire and
display power have mostly connected to methods of communication.
While “Counterparts” reflects the troubling gender relations of the
entire volume, culminating in Gabriel Conroy’s inability to understand
any of the women with whom he comes into contact, in Farrington’s sto-
ryline, women undercut his constructed identity as a contributor to the
literate practices of Dublin. Miss Parker’s machine foreshadows the end of
scrivening work for all of the law clerks and other office workers through-
out the modern business world. In Dublin at the time of the story, fair
copies handwritten by scriveners still reign as authentic law documents,
but the speed and consistency of typewriting machines eventually replaces
penmanship. Friedrich Kittler frames the important gender implications:
“When men are deprived of the quill and women of the needle, all hands
are up for grabs – as employable as employees. Typescript amounts to
the desexualization of writing, sacrificing its metaphysics and turning it
into word processing.”50 Farrington’s subsequent inability to write and
his retreat into the oral culture of the pubs partially reflects his discomfort
with the print culture replacing chirographic word and the accompanying
entry of women into the male world of writing.
The gender trouble of this story intersects with its oral and literate divide
as the increasingly literate culture of the office sends Farrington to escape
to the homosocial oral culture of the public house. The writing versus
speaking remains a focus for “Counterparts” as Farrington retreats to the
oral culture of the bar to escape the literate culture of the office, where he
cannot compete with the impending promotion of the typewriter. David
Lloyd hints at the connections between Farrington’s gendered fears and
his difficulty in navigating oral and literate contexts. Lloyd reflects that
“male rage and violence at the conditions of a specifically literate work
in an office with which, apparently, his very bodily frame is at odds, are
counterpoised with the heterotopic oral space of the public house, with
its odours and sensations and the prospect of homosocial conviviality and
even misrule or ‘riot.’”51 Lloyd is more interested in the manifestations
of drinking as an oral practice and a masculine space that “represents the
recalcitrance of Irish orality against the alienating rhythms of labour” and
the ways that oral culture justified nationalisms,52 but he ignores the media
interruption of the typewriter that precedes and announces the failure of
Farrington’s precarious balance of oral and written cultures.
When Farrington has successfully pawned his watch, he sets off for the
comfort of the bars and the give and take of the oral culture found there.
156 M. O. MARA
His position within the oral culture feels strong enough so that he becomes
comfortable “looking on the spectacle generally with proud satisfaction
and staring masterfully at the office-girls.”53 The narrative returns to the
original description of Farrington, and he again becomes “the man,” an
unnamed but specifically male Dubliner. Like Miss Parker, the office girls
are both an unspoken threat to male hegemony in the market and prey
for men like Farrington to stare down and master. “Counterparts” is one
of only a few stories in Dubliners where women’s entry into public busi-
ness spaces gets foregrounded, including the story immediately following
“Counterparts.” “Clay,” whose protagonist Maria “thought how much
better it was to be independent and to have your own money in your
pocket,”54 still represents women’s work as connected to the domestic and
the other characters fret at Maria’s lack of husband and children. While
Miss Parker and her unnamed and rather ghostly absent typewriter hover
in the background, Miss Delacour who “came to the office often,”55 but
does not seem to work there, represents a more traditional female role
as an object of desire and a prize to be impressed. The gender politics of
Joyce’s story intersect directly with the friction between oral practices and
the literate culture of Dublin business.
As the story progresses, Farrington can no longer maintain the verbal ban-
ter that he favors earlier in the story. The narrator reports how “Farrington’s
heavy dirty eyes leered at the company in token that he understood he was
being chaffed.”56 In this example, Farrington’s silence and the reference to
using his eyes to communicate indicate just how low he has sunk. As the
night progresses, even spoken words fail Farrington and he reverts mainly
to non-verbal communication, both in the arm wrestling competition and
when he beats his son. As Chaudhry-Fryer notes, “He transfers his power
play from the sphere of spoken or written language to body language when
he arm-wrestles Weathers.”57 Now, Farrington cannot even achieve a witty
response, and he is reduced to facial expressions in an attempt to be under-
stood. In the following exchange “He was so angry that he lost count of the
conversation of his friends,”58 suggests that even Farrington’s aptitude as a
witty raconteur eludes him by the end of the evening.
The final speech of the story comes from Farrington’s son who offers oral
culture answers, similar to but quite different from that of his father. The boy
offers the orality of verbal prayer suggesting that “I’ll say a Hail Mary ….”59
The son’s final attempt to assuage Farrington’s anger places young Tom
Farrington in the same position, attempting to use the oral mode of repeated
prayer as a tool to escape his current dilemma. Like his father, the child’s oral
skill goes unheeded, and he is beaten. This final snapshot of Farrington’s world
seem far removed from the office and Miss Parker’s typewriter, but the son’s
suggestion for a female interlocutor, the Blessed Virgin Mary, in Farrington’s
salvation harkens back to the momentary smile from Miss Delacour and the
ongoing clicking of Miss Parker’s typewriting machine. It emphasizes realiza-
tions that oral prowess carries little weight in the increasingly mediated print
world of Dublin business.
Revisiting Joyce’s Dubliners in light of commemorative rewritings pro-
vides a powerful analytic tool for understanding the original stories. In
McKeon’s “Counterparts,” the tools of social media stymie the literate
practitioners with electrate rules, which in turn allows reinvigorated atten-
tion to the tensions between oral and literate practices in Joyce’s story. In
the original “Counterparts,” female typewriters and their machines haunt
practitioners of oral and chirographic worlds, foregrounding the techno-
logical changes in print culture during the early twentieth century.
Notes
1. See David Lloyd, Irish Culture and Colonial Modernity 1800–2000: The
Transformation of Oral Space (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2011). See also Bernard Benstock, “Narrative Strategies: Tellers in the
‘Dubliners’ Tales,” Journal of Modern Literature, 25.4 (1989): 541–559.
2. See Geraldine Meaney, “Penelope, or, Myths Unraveling: Writing, Orality
and Abjection in Ulysses,” Textual Practice 519–529.
3. Lloyd, Irish Culture, 87.
4. Gregory L Ulmer, Internet Invention: From Literacy to Electracy (New
York: Longman, 2002), 47.
5. Walter J Ong, Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word
(London: Routledge, 2002), 40.
6. Denis Donoghue, “Orality, Literacy, and Their Discontents,” New Literary
History, 27.1 (1996), 150.
7. James Joyce, Dubliners (New York: Penguin), 82.
8. Ibid.
9. Ong, Orality and Literacy, 72.
10. Ibid.
12. Ibid.
13. Ibid.
14. Friedrich A Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter (Stanford, CA: Stanford
158 M. O. MARA
15. Chris Power, Rev. of “Dubliners 100: 15 New Stories Inspired by the

Original ” in The Guardian, June 12, 2014 (2014).
16. Katherine N. Hayles, My Mother Was a Computer: Digital Subjects and
Literary Texts (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 249.
17. Belinda McKeon, “Counterparts,” Dubliners 100: 15 New Stories Inspired
by the Original, ed. Thomas Morris (Dublin: Tramp Press, 2014), 112.
18. Terence Brown, ed. Dubliners, by James Joyce (New York: Penguin,

1992), 274.
20. Ibid., 82.
22. Ibid., 68.
24. Ibid.
25. Donoghue, “Orality, Literacy,” 150.
27. Ibid.
28. Lloyd, Irish Culture, 88.
29. Paul Delany, “‘Tailers of Malt, Hot, All Round’: Homosocial Consumption
in Dubliners,” Studies in Short Fiction 32 (1995), 385.
32. Ibid., 87.
34. Ibid.
36. Ibid., 87.
37. Ulmer, Internet Invention, 25.
39. Benstock, “Narrative Strategies,” 556.
41. Bernard Benstock, “The Gnomonics of Dubliners,” Modern Fiction

Studies, 30.4 (1988), 532.
43. Benstock, “Narrative Strategies,” 556.
45. Farrington’s mimicry of Mr. Alleyne plays to Higgins and Miss Parker as
audience.
46. Mamta Chaudhry-Fryer, “Power Play: Games in Joyce’s Dubliners,”

Studies in Short Fiction 32 (1995), 324.
47. Ibid.
49. Chaudhry-Fryer, “Power Play,” 324.
50. Kittler, Gramophone, 187.

51. Lloyd, Irish Culture, 90–91.
52. Ibid., 111.
54. Ibid., 98.
55. Ibid., 85.
56. Ibid., 90.
57. Chaudhry-Fryer, “Power Play,” 324.
59. Ibid., 94.
Bibliography
Benstock, Bernard. “Narrative Strategies: Tellers in the Dubliners Tales.” Journal
of Modern Literature XV.4 (1989): 541–559.
––––. “The Gnomonics of Dubliners.” Modern Fiction Studies 34.4 (1988):
519–539.
Brown, Terence, ed. Introduction and Notes. Dubliners. By James Joyce. New
York: Penguin, 1993.
Chaudhry-Fryer, Mamta. “Power Play: Games in Joyce’s Dubliners.” Studies in
Short Fiction 32 (1995): 319–27.
Delany, Paul. “‘Tailers of Malt, Hot, All Round’: Homosocial Consumption in
Dubliners.” Studies in Short Fiction 32 (1995): 381–393.
Donoghue, Denis. “Orality, Literacy, and Their Discontents.” New Literary
History 27.1 (1996): 145–159.
Hayles, N. Katherine. My Mother Was a Computer: Digital Subjects and Literary
Texts. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005.
Joyce, James. Dubliners. New York: Penguin, 1993.
Kittler, Friedrich A. Gramophone, Film, Typewriter. Stanford, CA: Stanford
Lloyd, David. Irish Culture and Colonial Modernity 1800–2000: The Transformation
of Oral Space. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011.
McKeon, Belinda. “Counterparts.” Dubliners 100: 15 New Stories Inspired by the
Original, edited by Thomas Morris. Dublin: Tramp Press, 2014.
Meaney, Geraldine. “Penelope, or, myths unraveling: writing, orality and abjection
in Ulysses.” Textual Practice 14.3 (2000): 519–529.
Ong, Walter J. Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word. London:
Routledge, 1982.
Power, Chris. Rev. of Dubliners 100: 15 New Stories Inspired by the Original. The
Guardian 12 June 2014.
Ulmer, Gregory L. Internet Invention: From Literacy to Electracy. New York:
Longman, 2003.
CHAPTER 9
Intermental Epiphanies: Rethinking

Dubliners with Cognitive Psychology
Martin Brick
Dubliners’ association with “epiphanies” has a long and, at times

contentious, history. Early scholarship emphasized the concept’s contri-
bution to the overall aesthetic mission of the book. In the 1940s, Harry
Levin declared Dubliners to be “a collection of epiphanies”1 and Irene
Hendry analyzed the technique as a “systematic formulation of common
esthetic experience.”2 In the 1960s, Robert Scholes prominently chal-
lenged the appropriateness of application of this term to the book, as he
and Florence Walzl debated in the PMLA. Morris Beja’s Epiphany in the
Modern Novel provides the tidy definition of the experience as “a sud-
den spiritual manifestation, whether from some object, scene, event, or
memorable phase of the mind – the manifestation being out of proportion
to the significance or strictly logical relevance of whatever produces it.”3
But such a description suggests a largely passive moment, as it comes from
some object. Joyce’s own discussion, however, implies greater agency. In
Stephen Hero, as Stephen Daedalus explains the concept to Cranly, we find
the “sudden spiritual manifestation” language that Beja adopts, but he
also refers to the “groping of a spiritual eye.”4 The mind actively reaches
out for stimuli by which it can have an epiphany.
M. Brick (*)
Department of English, Ohio Dominican University, Columbus, OH, USA
e-mail: brickm@ohiodominican.edu

DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-39336-0_9
162 M. BRICK
This essay intends to re-examine epiphanies by interrogating that act

of “groping.” While epiphanies in Joyce’s work are widely regarded as
moments that light upon a character and are highly private or individu-
alistic, an examination of Joyce’s fiction that takes into account theories
of cognition will recognize social aspects to these moments of insight.
Most thought, even that which we consider internal or private, actually
has external and social roots. Thus, epiphanies are not singular, sudden
manifestations, but rather products of what cognitive psychologists label
“intermental” thought. Simply put, epiphanies do not plainly strike an
individual, but rather they are the result of joint problem solving, whether
conscious or unconscious.
Recent applications of cognitive psychology to narrative theory have
explored literary representations of social problem solving, something
human beings engage in every day. The type of cognition labeled “inter-
mental” regards the mind not as a single, self-contained unit, but rather as a
social construction—a combination of brain, body, and world (which in turn
contains other minds). In light of these theories, we can read the epiphanies
of Dubliners not as sudden manifestations or revelations (hence the work of
chance, fate, or God), but rather as a type of group problem solving.
Alan Palmer describes intermental thought as “socially distributed, situ-
ated, or extended cognition.”5 Palmer draws on the work of psychologist
James Wertsch who analyzes dyads, that is, groups of people engaging in
“socially distributed cognition,” or more simply stated, working together
to “think” or “remember” things that an individual cannot independently
discover.6 As an illustration, Wertsch offers the story of a child who lost a toy
and her father’s efforts to help her find it through a series of questions. In
such a scenario, neither party truly “remembers” where the toy is, but each
contributes cognitive resources that lead to solving the problem.7 In fiction,
readers follow the mental acts of characters and, in doing so, encounter
a mix of such intermental activity and individual “intramental” cognition.
So, while Joyce’s epiphanies are not concrete problems subject to solving,
like finding lost toys, exploring intermental thought is useful since epipha-
nies are not strictly the product of the subject’s contemplation; an external
catalyst, almost always another individual who may be unaware of his or
her role as catalyst but nevertheless is not passive, exists, possessing agency
in the epiphanies by contributing mental action. These catalyst-individuals
rarely purposefully attempt to reveal anything to the subjects. This complex
relationship between minds, then, creates the conditions for an epiphany, a
revelation that neither party could conjure on its own.
INTERMENTAL EPIPHANIES 163
Intermental cognition also proves useful for re-examining Joyce’s

epiphanies since it shifts the way we think about fiction itself. Palmer
points out that standard approaches to studying and understanding fiction
give “undue emphasis to private, solitary, and highly verbalized thought
at the expense of all the other types of mental functioning.”8 Epiphanies,
perhaps more than any other feature of fiction, are commonly regarded
as solitary, internal experiences. This tendency offers all the more reason
to re-consider how Joyce’s characters experience and process epiphanies,
especially in light of an increased attention to the political, social, and ethi-
cal ramifications of Joyce’s writing. The intermental epiphany functions
as a means of illustrating individual desperation, alienation, and paralysis,
while also suggesting an undercurrent of shared recognition and a desire
to remedy the situation. Scholars such as Andrew Gibson have examined
the therapeutic agenda of Dubliners that emerges despite the bleakness
faced by the Irish at the time. He notes how newspapers like the United
Irishman depicted people “leeched of vigor, but also that ‘indifference and
apathy’ were not treated as moral shortcomings but as spiritual and politi-
cal problems.”9 Joyce attempts to foster a spiritual uplift, Gibson argues, as
he “increasingly connects strength to its reverse, to fragility, brokenness,
and above all doubt.”10 Other scholars, such as Margot Norris and Marian
Eide, argue that the book offers help because it calls for ethical reading.
Eide contends that readers suspend judgment of characters and “engage
with the alterity of characters.”11 In the conclusion of “An Encounter,” as
the narrator realizes he despises Mahoney, “Mahoney inadvertently effects
a change in his friend … who becomes other to himself.”12 This inadver-
tent change can be described as intermental cognition.
Just as Joyce categorized his stories – childhood, adolescence, maturity,
and public life13 – the stories display a spectrum of intermental activity that
roughly, though not exclusively, changes with the age of the characters. The
first group creates what I call “situational dyads”; cognitive systems are cre-
ated by chance, and often between strangers. A second type, which I label
“personal dyads,” involves more extended interaction in which the individuals
are consciously aware that an issue of some gravity has arisen. These relations
often contain conflict or manipulation. Last, there is a “projected dyad,” in
which one contributor is not an individual in the proper sense, but rather the
imagined perspective of another person who is absent, deceased, or a typal fig-
ure representing a larger group, such as the Church. Some stories display mul-
tiple dyads in order to bring about an epiphany and also some dyads appear
to display features of multiple types, making precise categorization difficult.
164 M. BRICK
“Araby” is a fine example of “situational” intermental activity. The

unnamed boy’s revelation is born of encounters with individuals—both
strangers and family members—who appear oblivious to his mission, and
nearly oblivious to his existence. The “problem” to be solved could be
said to be his unrealistic expectations of love, faith, and hope; do the boy’s
expectations need to be brought into alignment with his environment,
and if so, how? Individuals around the boy detect his undue dedication
to the coming bazaar, note his change in behavior, and offer small bits of
advice, warnings, or criticisms in order to re-shape his behavior.
His aunt worries that Araby may not be a fantastic display of “eastern
enchantment,” but rather “some Freemason affair,” and his schoolmas-
ter “hoped [the boy] was not beginning to idle,” given his distraction in
class.14 And, less directly, his uncle’s late arrival and his recitation of “The
Arab’s Farewell to His Steed” while the boy waits anxiously also contrib-
utes to his growing realization that the world is indifferent to his passions.
But right before the final epiphany of the story, the young lady in the
porcelain stall and the boy engage in intermental activity without con-
sciously attempting to solve any problem. She speaks to him “out of a
sense of duty.”15 These words suggest that she has read him, or more
properly, they have read each other, and collectively determine his status
in the situation. She recognizes that “he looked humbly” at the vases, sig-
naling to her that he feels out of place and deserves to be dismissed. Her
“chang[ing] of the position of one of the vases”16 before going back to
her conversation appears to contain a message—perhaps “I did not come
over here just to wait on you,” or more condescendingly, “let me draw
attention to something that I know you will not buy.” The second possi-
bility seems to register with the boy as the narrator informs us that he lin-
gered “to make his interest in her wares seem the more real.”17 So, though
epiphanies are commonly understood as sudden manifestations or revela-
tions of insight experienced passively, an examination of the intermental
workings here suggests that the boy anticipates his crushing reception and
even subconsciously negotiates with people to bring it about.
The central group of stories, those Joyce considered models of mature
life, display more direct examples of intermental activity, since the characters
tend to argue. “A Little Cloud” serves as an example of a personal dyad as
Little Chandler and Gallaher openly debate. First, they engage in a joint
consideration of morality. Though their conversation does not acknowl-
edge it outright, they seem to negotiate a common understanding of the
proper extent to which a young man ought to sow his wild oats. Chandler
is clearly jealous of Gallaher’s lifestyle, his experiences, his freedom, and his
confidence, but remains a by-and-large moral person who recalls lecturing a
hung-over Gallaher on Sunday mornings.18 Gallaher acknowledges the deca-
dence of his own life, but at the same time sets up Paris as further along a
spectrum of iniquity. “Talk of immorality,” he tells Chandler, “I’ve heard of
cases – what am I saying? I’ve known them: cases of … immorality ….”19 He
soon after admits that being back in Dublin is relaxing, almost as if he finds
it quaint. While he is boastful of his worldly experiences, the act of compar-
ing himself to examples too immoral to mention frames his transgressions
as acceptable, or even desirable. Though his intention is to make Chandler
jealous, together the pair outlines an “ideal” lifestyle.
But an aspect of intermental cognition that is more closely tied to
Chandler’s epiphany emerges in his changing behavior. Even before meet-
ing Gallaher, Chandler’s confidence is boosted as he reflects on feeling
superior to the people he passes in the street.20 His confidence is elevated
further with the help of the whiskey, and he taunts Gallaher, essentially
implying that he will eventually marry and end up like Chandler. Gallaher’s
almost violent refusal of the possibility demonstrates that intermental
cognition is indeed a joint activity, and though their little row sets up
Chandler’s epiphany, Gallaher also appears to recognize something here.
He fears that Chandler may be correct, and both share Chandler’s realiza-
tion that freedom and confidence are valuable but tenuous qualities.
When Chandler arrives home, his mind remains engaged with Gallaher’s
as he appears determined that he too can live an artist’s life. If he cannot
have the freedom to travel, at least he will embrace the intellectual and aes-
thetic aspects. He picks up a copy of Byron, but when the child becomes
upset and his wife berates him, Chandler’s cheeks burn with “shame” and
“remorse.”21 The epiphany entails more than self-recognition; it is not
simply a realization of the difference between Gallaher and himself. And
neither is the epiphany a simple acknowledgment of Gallaher’s judgment
of his life. He feels remorse because the potential to live differently existed
once, but that door has closed, and he feels shame for trying to re-capture
it. Neither mind could have pinned down exactly what is shameful and
regrettable about Chandler’s life, but together they have identified it.
Like Little Chandler’s epiphany, Gabriel Conroy’s is one of realization
that his life experiences do not measure up to those of another individual.
The other individual is no longer alive, however, so Conroy cannot come
to this conclusion through direct conversation. Still, examination of the
source of the revelation points toward an intermental process, originating
166 M. BRICK
in a dyad with Gretta, who then projects a specter of Michael Furey, such
that Conroy’s mind cooperates with this external, constructed conscious-
ness to make conclusions about himself that otherwise would have been
out of his mental reach.
As the party at Kate and Julia’s winds down, Conroy is primed to con-
nect with his wife on an intimate and powerful level as he longs to “recall
to her those moments … forget the years of their dull existence together
and remember only the moments of ecstasy.”22 Arriving at the hotel,
he feels “pang[s] of lust” and believes that they are escaping “together
with wild and radiant hearts.”23 On first observation, Conroy is utterly
oblivious to Gretta’s emotions, and thus cannot be said to be cognitively
linked to her. But in another sense, her thoughts of Michael Furey take
her back to a time when she experienced simple, passionate love, which is
what Conroy wishes the evening would rekindle between Gretta and him.
Silently, they have come to want something very similar. As the nature of
their joint cognition becomes more open, the epiphany of his inability to
live up to this fantasy is uncovered, and with it a complete examination of
his character ensues. The realization that he is a “ludicrous figure, acting
as a pennyboy for his aunts, a nervous well-meaning sentimentalist”24 is
not information he could have gathered on his own, nor information that
Gretta knew needed to be communicated to him.
Gretta’s distance and coldness helps him determine the hollowness of
his life as it stands, but it is after she falls asleep, and he further contem-
plates Michael Furey, that he fully recognizes what he falls short of. With
the image that Gretta helps to conjure, Conroy further animates Furey’s
consciousness. As she sleeps, Conroy looks at her face and attempts to
imagine Furey’s perspective, to imagine seeing the seventeen-year-old
beauty “for which [he] had braved death.”25 The quiddity of his own
existence—the clearest articulation of himself as being close to the dead,
as living in “a gray impalpable world”26—comes as he channels the con-
nection between Gretta and Furey. He imagines eye contact between the
young lovers, a memory Gretta clearly carried for years, and this leads to
his thought that “he had never felt like that toward any woman but he
knew that such a feeling must be love.”27 A rational mind would realize
that Furey is playing with a stacked deck; an actual lifelong relationship
with its day-to-day banalities cannot compare to a teenager’s perception of
love, coupled with the melodramatic effect of an untimely death, but the
intermental connection that has been created on this snowy evening offers
Conroy a powerful self-assessment.
Other stories from the “public life” section of Dubliners do not conjure
projected dyads with deceased individuals, but rather the central char-
acters engage in intermental activity with typal figures. In “Grace” for
example, Mr. Kernan negotiates to solve the problem of his alcoholism
not only with the individuals around him, but also between him and the
Catholic Church as a collective body. In his insistence that he does not
have to hold a candle at the retreat, he appears to be bargaining not with
Cunningham and the others, but with the Catholic mind. It is tempting
here to suggest that he is not actually working with a “mind” but simply
reacting to his cultural situation.28 Note, however, the Catholic Church
possesses agency similar to that of an individual. The church censures him.
But imbedded in that censure, it also supports and counsels him. What he
receives from the Church is the equivalent to mental stimuli from a single,
conscious human mind.
One may note in many of these stories, exact categorization of a single
type of dyad is hazy. Some stories clearly shift, such as “The Dead” which
begins with a personal connection between Gretta and Gabriel, but then
transforms to a projected link. Alternately, “Clay” begins with situational
dyads similar to those in “Araby” at the start of Maria’s evening, but con-
cludes with a personal one formed with Joe. The boy in “The Sisters”
also develops situational dyads, but in his growing understanding of the
public’s perception of Father Flynn, he interacts with a projected cognitive
entity. Other stories are simply difficult to categorize. Doyle’s relationship
with his friends in “After the Race” may seem personal since he knows
them well and their interaction is more than quick, passing remarks, but
then again, unlike Gretta or Gallaher, his friends appear unaware of any
mental conflict Doyle experiences, and thus this might be best categorized
as situational. Yet other epiphanies stem from relationships that shift as they
progress. Duffy’s interaction with Mrs. Sinico in “A Painful Case” certainly
begins as personal, but his revelation comes after her passing. Would his
pondering of her final years represent a projected link, similar to Conroy’s
relation to Furey? In that light, does Chandler’s connection with Gallaher
become projected in the conclusion of the story, since the man is clearly
on his mind, but not physically present? Questions like these abound, but
the labels themselves are not important. I distinguish types of intermen-
tal dyads not because categorization is imperative, but rather to illustrate
that intermental cognition can be represented many ways in narrative. It
is not limited to conversation or non-verbal communication between two
individuals. This concept of intermental cognition is not simply another
168 M. BRICK
way to talk about the subtext of dialogue between characters. Rather, the
dependence upon dialogue and other characters’ actions underscores the
necessity of communal activity to the Irish people. In his contribution to
the collection Semicolonial Joyce, Luke Gibbons points to the damaging
marginalization and suppression of the individual in post-Famine Ireland
and the importance of communal ritual and the intimacy of the home.
The intermental epiphany suggests a similar but even more basic agenda
in Joyce’s writing: people need to talk to heal. Despite the burdens they
suffer, the Irish can only overcome frustration through recognition, and
recognition follows communication.
But if communication is integral to activating a recovery, what is to be
said of the stories which do not contain clear epiphanies for the characters,
but rather, the revelations occur to readers alone? One simple solution is
that their ignorance is exactly the point Joyce intends to make, especially
since this occurs mostly in the later stories. As Dublin’s citizens age, they
become more imbedded in dehumanizing institutions and patterns, and
more removed from purposeful lives. The more entrenched they become,
the more awareness of their own situations fades. Simply put, it is too late
for them. But this ignorance does not preclude the representation of inter-
mental activity in the narrative. Though cognitive problems are not “solved”
in a flash of insight, as in “Araby,” “Eveline,” and other early stories, social
cognition occurs between characters in later stories, revealing the nature of
the participants, thereby allowing readers to acknowledge the potential for
formative communication where the characters remain oblivious.
Other theories of socially mediated cognition can aid in understand-
ing these reader-epiphany stories. “Positioning theory,” for example,
examines how individuals present themselves in relation to one another in
terms of social hierarchy, likability, culpability, and many other qualities.
David Herman explains, “positions are selections made by participants in
discourse, who use position-assigning speech acts to build ‘storylines’ in
terms of which the assignments make sense.”29 Hence, even when charac-
ters fail to recognize their own paralysis, their discourse with other charac-
ters uncovers what they, and others, subconsciously determine their social
position to be.
“The Boarding House” follows this pattern. The dyads Mr. Doran forms
are largely projected as he reacts to society and to the Church, but note also
the strong sense of positioning achieved by the narrative authority. When
the text reads, “She counted her cards again …. She felt sure she would win.
He was a serious young man, not rakish or loud-voiced,”30 readers perceive
Mrs. Mooney’s calculating and confident manner. Further, her assessment

of his character as “serious” must be based on acts of observation and inter-
action; she cannot pull this impression from thin air. As Doran climbs the
stairs, the narrative focalizes on his perspective, providing evidence that Mrs.
Mooney correctly judged his position: “But the sin was there; even his sense
of honour told him that reparation must be made for such a sin.”31 Doran
regards himself as both victim and agent, and he is complicit in the paralysis
into which he slips.
The positioning approach to social cognition illustrates that readers
learn about characters’ cognitive functions both through narration of their
internal, solitary musings, and through their public, behavioral actions—
or as Palmer describes, fiction takes both an “internalist perspective” and
an “externalist perspective” to represent mental functioning.32 While
epiphanies may be more immediately associated with the internal, external
or public action is just as important. Just as the epiphanies experienced
by the boy in “Araby” or by Little Chandler were conveyed to the reader
through both their internal thoughts and external representations of inter-
mental cognition, so too those epiphanies that readers alone experience,
those to which the characters remain ignorant, require reports of both
internal and external mental functioning, and further that the positioning
of these characters emphasizes resignation and lack of communication.
A blatant example of a character in a desperate situation but unaware
of any revelation is Farrington in “Counterparts.” This story is often
paired with “A Little Cloud” in critical discussions because both stories
follow clerks unfulfilled in their work, and both return home to a dys-
functional family life. Both characters are paralyzed by these aspects of
their lives, although the source of their paralysis differs. Chandler has been
hemmed in by his timidity, while Farrington is an alcoholic who blames his
problems on others. The former comes to recognize his paralysis, while
the latter does not.
The epiphany of “Counterparts” is revealed through a personal dyad
formed between Farrington and his son, Tom, who offers to pray a “Hail
Mary” as his father beats him. Farrington comes into the situation contem-
plating his own failure. He experiences something approaching an epiph-
any when he ventures home from the pub, full of “smouldering anger and
revengefulness …, humiliated and discontented,” realizing he spent all his
money, pawned his watch, probably lost his job, injured his pride by los-
ing the arm-wrestling match, and had not even gotten drunk.33 Farrington
dwells on this, contributing mental action to the reader’s epiphany, but on
170 M. BRICK
his own, he reaches no real revelation. Most prominently, he looks for a

scapegoat, someone to reassure him of his power. Tom’s contribution to
the problem bars Farrington from epiphany while facilitating readers. The
son accepts a submissive role in agreeing to cook dinner and acknowledges
the father’s strength by begging for mercy and offering prayer. The sig-
nificance of the boy’s looking to the Holy Mother for intervention as his
father beats him is lost on Farrington who receives what he wants: fear. He
has no reason to ponder the situation further.
The public life section of Dubliners is dominated by similar reader
epiphanies. Nevertheless, communication that fosters joint cognition
persists. Similar to the retreat in “Grace,” “A Mother” features an event
intended to help an individual—the concert supports Kathleen’s musi-
cal ambitions much as the retreat is intended to curb Kernan’s alcohol-
ism—but in both cases, they miss the mark. Rather than the projected,
typal dyads of “Grace,” “A Mother” operates through personal interac-
tion, most notably between Mrs. Kearney and Mr. Holohan. The overt
agenda of their cooperation is the planning of the best possible concert
series, a promotion of culture in Dublin, but without verbal acknowledg-
ment, the two quickly push musical talent to the periphery of their con-
sideration. When Mrs. Kearney brings out the decanter and silver biscuit
tin, then begins to advise Holohan on programming, Kathleen’s talent has
already been marginalized. The whiskey and sweets make it clear that Mrs.
Kearney is, in essence, bribing Holohan into a more favorable contract
and taking pleasure in her own sense of dominance. Holohan realizes that
he is “a novice”34 in such matters, and is perhaps just as interested in Mrs.
Kearney’s organizational skills as he is in the daughter’s voice. They work
together to organize a show that entertains the public, but both know that
the talent is mediocre. Their conversation after the opening night suggests
that both knew this all along. Intermentally, they come to realize that this
is not a sustainable model, but fail to have a genuine epiphany regarding
the implications of their own behavior. Mrs. Kearney’s micromanagement
of her daughter’s contract and Mr. Holohan’s persistent dodges and defer-
ment to Mr. Fitzpatrick work to make clear that they have relegated talent
and art below the financial and social concerns of the concert. Neither
character is honestly surprised at the end of the story when Mr. Holohan
states, “I never thought you’d treat us this way,” and Mrs. Kearney
expresses similar sentiments about Holohan.35 As in “Two Gallants,” each
party has been contributing to a general lesson of mistrust masked by false
civility. Though both are complicit in this mistrust or betrayal, each feels
personally victimized and fails to see, though the reader does, that petty
fights actually victimize Kathleen and the arts scene as a whole.
This last group of stories, offering epiphanies that readers recognize
while the characters remain unaware, calls to our attention the super-
natural associations of epiphany. The characters’ ignorance would seem
to challenge the spiritual or mystical aspect of the epiphany. Joyce did,
after all, use liturgical language when he created epiphanies. And in this
light, it would seem that these moments of insight ought to be viewed
from a supernatural perspective: they are gifts, guidance bestowed by a
higher power. From such a perspective, any approach that de-mystifies
the events could appear to run contrary to the author’s intentions. But
then again, we must consider Joyce’s intention, as stated in his letter to
Grant Richards, to write a “moral history of my country” and specifically
to identify Dublin as “the centre of paralysis.”36 His attention points to
the people, their actions and attitudes, or rather, their inaction. Implicit
in that inaction is a suppression of genuine communication. But the inter-
mental epiphany illustrates that a desire for self-revelation exists, if only on
a subconscious level, and further that introspection has its roots in social
engagement.
Notes
1. Harry Levin, James Joyce: A Critical Introduction, Rev. and Aug. ed. (New
York: New Directions, 1960), 29.
2. Irene Hendry, “Joyce’s Epiphanies,” The Sewanee Review, 54.3 (Jul–Sep
1946), 451.
3. Morris Beja, Epiphany in the Modern Novel (Seattle: University of
Washington Press, 1971), 18.
4. James Joyce, Stephen Hero, ed. Theodore Spencer (London: Jonathan
Cape, 1956), 218.
5. Alan Palmer, “Intermental Thought in the Novel: The Middlemarch
Mind,” Style 39.4 (Winter 2005): 184.
6. James V. Wertsch, Voices of the Mind: A Sociocultural Approach to Mediated
Action (Cambridge [MA]: Harvard University Press, 1991), 27–28.
7. Ibid., 25–26.
8. Palmer, “Intermental Thought,” 429.
2013), 36.
10. Ibid., 5.
172 M. BRICK
11. Marian Eide. Ethical Joyce (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,

2002), 3.
12. Ibid., 7.
Joyce, Vol. 2, ed. Richard Ellmann (New York: Viking Press, 1966), 134.
14. James Joyce, Dubliners: Text, Criticism, and Notes, ed. Robert Scholes and
A. Walton Litz (New York: Viking Press, 1969), 32.
15. Ibid., 35.
16. Ibid.
17. Ibid.
18. Ibid., 76.
19. Ibid., 78.
20. Ibid., 73.
21. Ibid., 85.
22. Ibid., 213–14.
23. Ibid., 215.
24. Ibid., 220.
25. Ibid., 222.
26. Ibid., 223.
27. Ibid., 223.
28. For a more thorough explanation of collective bodies acting as single enti-
ties engaged in social cognition, see Palmer’s discussion of how whole
towns possess a single “mind” in Evelyn Waugh’s Men at Arms
(“Storyworlds” 186) and in George Eliot’s Middlemarch (“Intermental”).
29. David Herman, “Narrative Theory after the Second Cognitive Revolution,”
in Introduction to Cognitive Cultural Studies, ed. Lisa Zunshine (Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins Press, 2010), 162.
31. Ibid., 67.
32. Palmer, “Intermental Thought,” 185.
34. Ibid., 138.
35. Ibid., 148.
Bibliography
Beja, Morris. Epiphany in the Modern Novel. Seattle: University of Washington
Press, 1971.
Eide, Marian. Ethical Joyce. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002.
Gibbons, Luke. “‘Have You No Homes to Go to?’: James Joyce and the Politics
of Paralysis.” Semicolonial Joyce, edited by Derek Attridge and Marjorie Howes,
150–171. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000.
Hendry, Irene. “Joyce’s Epiphanies.” The Sewanee Review. 54.3 (Jul-Sep 1946):
449–67.
Herman, David. “Narrative Theory after the Second Cognitive Revolution.”
Introduction to Cognitive Cultural Studies, edited by Lisa Zunshine, 155–175.
Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 2010.
Joyce, James. Dubliners: Text, Criticism, and Notes. Edited by Robert Scholes and
A. Walton Litz. New York: Viking, 1969.
––––. Letters of James Joyce. Vol. 2. Edited by Richard Ellmann. New York: Viking,
1966.
––––. Stephen Hero. Edited by Theodore Spencer. London: Jonathan Cape, 1956.
Levin, Harry. James Joyce: A Critical Introduction. Rev. and Aug. ed. New York:
New Directions, 1960.
Palmer, Alan. “Intermental Thought in the Novel: The Middlemarch Mind.” Style
39.4 (Winter 2005): 427–439.
––––. “Storyworlds and Groups.” Introduction to Cognitive Cultural Studies,
edited by Lisa Zunshine, 176–192. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 2010.
Scholes, Robert. “Joyce and the Epiphany: The Key to the Labyrinth?” Critical
Essays on James Joyce’s “A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man,” edited by
Philip Brady and James F. Carens, 27–35. New York: G.K. Hall & Co, 1998.
Scholes, Robert and Florence Walzl. “The Epiphanies of Joyce.” PMLA 82.1 (Mar
1967). 152–54.
Wertsch, James V. Voices of the Mind: A Sociocultural Approach to Mediated Action.
Cambridge [MA]: Harvard University Press, 1991.
CHAPTER 10
From “Spiritual Paralysis” to “Spiritual

Liberation”: Joyce’s Samaritan “Grace”
Jack Dudley
I like the notion of the Holy Ghost being in the ink-bottle.1
In 1904, when James Joyce first published “The Sisters” in The Irish
Homestead under the pseudonym “Stephen Dædalus,” “Providence” not
“paralysis” framed the story.2 “Providence” had apparently guided the
young narrator to the window of the old priest to watch for his death. It
was, the narrator states significantly, “a whimsical kind of Providence,”
signaling in the unlikely proximity of whimsy and divinity, a central preoc-
cupation for Joyce’s writings at the time: the selective modification and
repurposing of the spiritual sources in his religious upbringing.3 Since the
priest’s death had indeed occurred, this whimsical “Providence” makes
of the narrator “a prophet” for correctly anticipating the fatal hour. Yet,
because Joyce often appears to be a writer who disbelieves in and s ecularizes
the religion of his youth, his strikingly religious vocabulary has less signifi-
cantly informed readings of his work. “Paralysis,” which frames the final
version of “The Sisters,” not the intriguing earlier whimsical Providence,
has come to overwhelmingly shape critical approaches to Dubliners.
J. Dudley (*)
Department of English, Mount St. Mary’s University, Emmitsburg, MD, USA
e-mail: dudley@msmary.edu

DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-39336-0_10
176 J. DUDLEY
Although some critics such as Dominic Head and Richard Greaves have
challenged “the simple paralysis reading”—to borrow Head’s terms—
anthologies, guidebooks, and other pedagogical resources still briskly situ-
ate the text through the unqualified paralysis reading.4 Another essay that
appears alongside Greave’s challenge in A Companion to the British and
Irish Short Story still offers that standard account. In this survey, “Irish
Short Fiction: 1880–1945,” Patrick Lonergan writes that Joyce arranges
“his stories into four sections, each of them representing a phase of human
existence: childhood, adolescence, maturity, and public life. In each case,
we see characters experiencing various forms of paralysis.”5 The Norton
Anthology of English Literature follows suit: “Joyce began his career by
writing a series of stories that etched, with extraordinary clarity, aspects
of Dublin life. These stories—published as Dubliners in 1914—are sharp,
realistic sketches of what Joyce called the ‘paralysis’ that beset the lives of
people in then-provincial Ireland.”6 For many students and teachers of
Joyce, these summary critical statements, often the only ones they read,
will predetermine any reading of the text.
These critical condensations are drawn, of course, from the 5 May let-
ter to Grant Richards, where Joyce outlines what has become the stan-
dard frames for the collection: “the moral history” of his country, Dublin
as “the centre of paralysis,” the “four aspects” (childhood through pub-
lic life), and the realistic “style of scrupulous meanness.”7 Missing from
this account is an earlier articulation to Richards of his intention: “I have
taken the first steps toward the spiritual liberation of my country.”8 While,
despite the dominant paralysis reading, critics have actually often looked at
avenues of escape and potential freedom in Dubliners, the idea of particu-
larly “spiritual liberation” is seldom considered, or, when it is, left without
explication to shift easily into the moral or the ethical. Yet, written around
the same time as the famous paralysis letter, Joyce’s Stephen Hero actually
expanded on unqualified paralysis to qualify it with precisely the word
“spiritual,” setting paralysis off against Irish Catholicism: Joyce writes that
Stephen “drifted in and out of interminable chapels” witnessing as he did
the “life of spiritual paralysis” created by “the farce of Irish Catholicism.”9
To this life of Irish “spiritual paralysis,” Joyce intended with Dubliners
some kind of “spiritual liberation.”
This essay opens up new ways of understanding Joyce, generally, and
Dubliners, specifically, by reading his story “Grace” through the most
intriguing theological word in Joyce’s vocabulary, the word “spiritual.”
Joyce used the term “spiritual” to describe not only his central aesthetic
FROM “SPIRITUAL PARALYSIS” TO “SPIRITUAL LIBERATION” 177
and subjective form, the epiphany, but also many of his key ideas and
themes, especially when he was writing Dubliners. I first define what Joyce
meant by “spiritual,” using his own writings to show that he understood
the term to convey transcendent or supernatural meaning, that is, mean-
ing that exceeded the limits of strict nature and materialism. As a result,
Dubliners, and Joyce’s work as a whole, can be seen as theological inter-
ventions, not solely aesthetic or moral ones. I then examine how reading
Joyce’s spirituality for transcendent meaning applies to his story “Grace,”
to show how what has been almost universally read to be a critique of
paralyzing religion and the hypocrisy of simony is actually a much more
focused and nuanced engagement with Joyce’s religious sources, one that
achieves for Joyce a spiritual meaning all his own.
My reading shows that Joyce’s send-up of Father Purdon and the
priest’s idea of a “spiritual accountant”10 certainly attacks simony, but,
more importantly, it targets the division of nature and grace into sepa-
rate categories, a central point of modern Roman Catholic theology
that Joyce rejected. Against the reigning Irish Catholic idea of a distant
grace, Joyce contrasts the intervention of the anonymous “young man
in a cycling-suit,”11 who critics of the 1960s and 70s identified with the
Good Samaritan from the Gospel of Luke. I argue that what was for a
time supposed to be Joyce’s last story in the collection offers more than
a final vision of irony, paralysis, and religious critique. Instead, the story
imagines a kind of “spiritual liberation,” suggested by the immanent type
of grace in the Samaritan encounter between the cyclist and Mr. Kernan,
an event drawn from Joyce’s own life and one that became the central act
of Ulysses, when Leopold Bloom rescues the fallen Stephen in “Circe.”
In my reading, “Grace” is thus seen as a story of “spiritual paralysis,” but
also “spiritual liberation,” one that critiques Irish Catholicism but draws
from Judeo-Christian tradition the ethical terms and images for that very
critique and a possible means of mobility, both spiritual and physical, and
a possible means of escape.
This reading shows that, in fact, the resources Joyce sought for renewed
mobility emerged from a careful reengagement with his religious tradition,
turned on itself, specifically from his appropriation of the term “spiritual.”
For modernism more largely, this essay contributes to Pericles Lewis’s
assertion that “the early twentieth century was a period when elite groups
started to consider the spiritual possibilities of life outside a church or syna-
gogue, even as the broader culture remained largely—and traditionally—
religious, particularly in the English-speaking world.”12 In other words,
178 J. DUDLEY
as Lewis correctly suggests, modernism represented not a turn away from

religion, but a complex reengagement and reimagining of its meaning-
making potential. Joyce not only responded to those forces, he centrally
shaped them, striving to find a way of maintaining transcendent and more
than merely material ways of giving, as T.S. Eliot recognized, shape, order,
and significance to human experience.13 Before turning to the spiritual
Joyce, I first survey the influential idea of a secular Joyce.
The Secular Joyce

In the Secular Joyce, following one reading of Richard Ellmann’s influential
biography, the writer transforms the material of his religious background
into the secular material of his art. Joyce strips religion of transcendent and
mystical meaning or of any theological purpose. He then repurposes his
Catholic inheritance to aesthetic and secular ends, ironically or for orna-
mentation and formal purposes. This view proceeds by emphasizing seem-
ingly anti-religious material from the biography, statements like Joyce’s
assertion that he would not “superimpose on my child the very trouble-
some burden of belief” and that he himself was “incapable of belief of any
kind.”14 Central in this secular version of Joyce is the 29 August 1904 let-
ter to Nora Barnacle. Here, Joyce writes that his “mind rejects the whole
present social order and Christianity—my home, the recognized virtues,
classes of life, and religious doctrines. … Six years ago,” he continues to
his future wife, “I left the Catholic Church, hating it most fervently” and
“made secret war upon it” and “declined to accept the positions it offered
me.”15 Yet, in this same young letter, Joyce attacks not religion itself, but
very specific targets: “Christianity” and its “religious doctrines” as well as
“the Catholic Church.” Indeed, in the very same letter, Joyce takes the
meaning-making structures of the Church, its sacramental understanding
of reality, and appropriates it to express his experience of Nora. He writes
that he considered her shyness to be “a kind of sacrament.”
While scholars like Lewis, Mary Lowe-Evans, and Roy Gottfried have
helped temper this secular reading of Joyce and begun to explore new ways of
understanding his relationship to religion and its questions, the secular Joyce
still holds significant sway.16 In Literary Epiphany in the Novel, 1850–1950,
Sharon Kim asserts that Joyce “expressly denies” any “mystical, religious,
or moral” “vectors” to his use of the term “spiritual” and that Stephen
Dedalus “rejects any supernatural dimension” to epiphany, one of Joyce’s
central aesthetic and perceptual principles.17 The epiphany, like “spiritual,”
is in Kim’s reading, “expressly non-supernatural and post-Christian.”18 If,

in The Strong Spirit: History, Politics and Aesthetics in the Writings of James
Joyce, 1898–1915, Andrew Gibson’s language at first smacks of transcen-
dence, Gibson finally domesticates his spiritual terms to materialism.19 He
emphatically qualifies that his book has “no interest in any transcendent
concept of spirituality or the spiritual domain” and that he finds “Geert
Lernout’s arguments for a secular Joyce” to be “altogether persuasive” (4
n.6). Instead, Gibson proceeds through a “historical-materialist” methodol-
ogy, which he claims is “determined by Joyce himself.”20
In the most sustained presentation of the argument for the secu-
lar Joyce, Help My Unbelief: James Joyce and Religion, Geert Lernout
advances a stridently secular understanding of Joyce, but has taken that
reading further to argue for what he calls the “Ellmannian consensus
about Joyce’s religion.”21 Lernout bases this reading on Ellmann’s state-
ment, “He [Joyce] was no longer a Christian himself; but he converted
the temple to new uses instead of trying to knock it down, regarding it as a
superior kind of human folly and one which, interpreted by a secular artist,
contained obscured bits of truth.”22 Lernout concludes: “This sentence
represents Ellmann’s ultimate judgment on Joyce’s religion.”23 But, there
are two problems with this declaration. First, the critical slippage: Lernout
takes Ellmann’s assertion about “Christianity” and applies it to all “reli-
gion.” Second, Lernout also fails to consider that in 1982, the same year
he completed revisions to the biography, Ellmann also wrote of Joyce’s
religion and politics in an essay used as a prologue to the collection Light
Rays: James Joyce and Modernism. There, Ellmann asserts this appraisal
of Joyce and religion: “To be opposed to the Church as an institution is
one thing; to be opposed to all religious feeling is another.”24 Ellmann
goes on to recount an anecdote from Stanislaus that indicates Joyce prob-
ably believed in a deity.25 Moreover, if we look at the 1959 edition of the
Ellmann biography, we find that the quotation Lernout cites from the
biography was in fact penned then, in 1959, and appears in both editions.
It is hardly Ellmann’s “ultimate judgment” on Joyce and religion.26 If
there is, indeed, such an Ellmannian consensus among Joyce critics, then
it is both the wrong reading of Joyce and the wrong reading of Ellmann.
Ellmann concluded not that Joyce rejected religion, but that he rejected
the Roman Catholic Church and remained interested in religious feeling
and sacred sensibilities. However, most contemporary Joyce critics have
concluded that Joyce just rejected religion. And, if they raise religion, they
do so tentatively, with qualification and hesitation.
180 J. DUDLEY
Vicki Mahaffey and Jill Shashaty illustrate this hesitant approach to reli-
gion and Joyce in their introduction to Collaborative “Dubliners”: Joyce in
Dialogue. When they propose to understand Dubliners parabolically, that
is, as providing the reader with parables—building on a previous essay by
Shashaty—they proceed with pointed caution: “At this point, our argument
takes a controversial turn, as we widen the frame of analogues to Joyce’s
Dubliners to include the parables of Jesus of Nazareth.”27 Mahaffey and
Shashaty guardedly continue to qualify: “We want to make it clear at the
outset that we are examining these parables not in a religious context but in a
literary and political one. Our approach to the topic of historical Christianity
is not doctrinal, but secular.”28 Such critical binaries do not do justice to
Joyce since, by the use of the term spiritual, he sought to fly between polar-
izing critical nets like “doctrinal” and “secular.” These critical terms create
binaries that polarize and separate what Joyce intends to blend: “religious”
versus “political” and “literary,” “doctrinal” versus “secular,” or “orthodox”
versus “heretical” do not map cleanly onto his work or life.
Since “secular,” now a prominently debated term in critical theory, has
subsequently come to mean either “absent religion” or “against religion,”
the term distorts Joyce’s approach to the question.29 Instead, Joyce consis-
tently appropriated the religious resources of his Catholic background not
for secular ends, at least not how we use the term today, nor merely aesthetic
purposes. Instead, Joyce intended what he himself called “spiritual” purposes,
a mystical transcendence that drew its meaning from concepts like divinity
and soul. This term, spiritual, not only emerges as central to his view of art
and life, but generates new ways of reading stories like “Grace” when it helps
us see those stories advance a specifically transcendent vision. What I mean by
“transcendent” is that Joyce’s writings maintained a sense of sacredness, reli-
gious valence, and mystical meaning that transcends mere matter. Yet, Joyce’s
transcendence is distinct from that preached by the Roman Catholicism of
his time, which taught that transcendence was above and beyond the physi-
cal world and bestowed by God alone, through the Roman Catholic Church
alone.30 Joyce instead embraced the physical world, but he didn’t jettison
religious transcendence. Instead, he located it precisely in that material world
in the form of spiritual meaning revealed to his readers through his writings.
The Spiritual Joyce

Joyce’s use of the term “spiritual” emerges early in his letters and critical
writings and appears with striking density in his work during the early
1900s, around the time of the composition of Stephen Hero, Dubliners,
Portrait, and Exiles. In his 1901 letter to Henrik Ibsen, Joyce writes of the
“spiritual truth” of Ibsen’s play John Gabriel Borkman, before comforting
the playwright, who was near death, that “higher and holier enlighten-
ment lies—onward.”31 In the 1900 essay “Drama and Life,” Joyce out-
lines a kind of spiritual vision, one where at birth, human beings sense “a
spirit, of which they were dimly conscious”; “this spirit is as the roaming
air, little susceptible of change, and never left their vision, shall never leave
it, till the firmament is as a scroll rolled.”32 The young Joyce showcases a
habit that would mark his engagement with religion throughout his life:
he takes material from biblical and Catholic contexts and repurposes it,
not to secular or areligious ends, but to new forms of spiritual and tran-
scendent meaning. In this last line, “till the firmament is as a scroll rolled,”
left unglossed by the annotators of the essay, Joyce references an image in
both Isaiah 34.4 and Revelation 6.14, repurposing it to an understanding
of spirit within the world.
Not only do “spiritual” and “spirit” appear in scatterings throughout
Joyce’s early critical writings, but also many of Joyce’s central statements
about his beliefs and art depend on the word. Joyce would state his poetic
intent to his brother, Stanislaus, in similar words, stating he sought for his
readers “spiritual enjoyment” and “spiritual uplift.”33 When Stephen out-
lines his concept of epiphany in Stephen Hero, he too has recourse to the
term, describing it as “a sudden spiritual manifestation” produced by the
“gropings of a spiritual eye.”34 In 1906, Joyce writes to Grant Richards
that “the Irish are the most spiritual race on the face of the earth.”35 In
Exiles, Robert’s article about Ireland and Richard specifically speaks of two
types of exile, “there is an economic and there is a spiritual exile.”36 He
continues that there are “those who left her [Ireland] to seek the bread by
which men live and there are others, nay, her most favoured children, who
left her to seek in other lands that food of the spirit by which a nation of
human beings is sustained by life.”37 As with his letter to Nora or with the
scriptural references in his essay “Drama and Life,” Joyce repurposes the
language of Catholicism to new, but still spiritual, purpose.
In Stephen Hero, we find something like a definition of this term, “spiri-
tual,” which Stephen connects with that other enduring Joycean idea drawn
from Roman Catholicism, the soul. Stephen here replies to Cranly’s inquiry
“Soul?”: “—Yes: from my soul, my spiritual nature.”38 And, while Kim asserts
that the term is “amorphous and uncontainable, slipping easily through the
fingers and never quite apprehended,” Joyce didn’t use the term in a vacuum
and the clearest ambient aids to a definition of “spiritual” come from his
182 J. DUDLEY
religious context, which shows that he used the term with modified, but still
transcendent meaning.39 That Joyce understood the term to mean super-
natural transcendence is borne out by its use in Portrait, where he connects
the term early on with religious meaning. The Stephen of Portrait thinks
of “the swamp of spiritual and bodily sloth in which his whole being had
sunk.”40 The hell sermon begins with Ignatius of Loyola’s “spiritual exer-
cises”41 and describes the “spiritual pain” of “the damned”42 and their “spiri-
tual torment.”43 When Stephen enters his devotional phase, he thinks instead
of his “spiritual triumph,”44 his “spiritual energy,”45 and his “spiritual knowl-
edge.”46 While Portrait jettisons the discussion of epiphany in Stephen Hero,
it retains “spiritual” as a key description of the state achieved by Stephen’s
aesthetic, where he describes the “instant wherein that supreme quality of
beauty, the clear radiance of the esthetic image, is apprehended luminously
by the mind” as “a spiritual state.”47 In the diary sections, Stephen also refers
ironically to the “spiritual-heroic refrigerating apparatus, invented and pat-
ented in all countries by Dante Alighieri.”48
Nor was this spiritual sensibility confined to Joyce’s critical writing and
his fiction. It was drawn from his life, in events that are described in the
terms of traditional religion, but from a man outside its boundaries. In
a 14 February 1907 postcard to Stanislaus, Joyce recounts that when he
had seen Götterdämmerung, “Nothing in the opera moved me. […]. Only
when Siegfried dies I responded from the crown of my head to his cry ‘O
sposa sacra’ [O sacred spouse]. I suppose there are a few men from time to
time who really feel an impulse towards Gawd.”49 In his Trieste notebook,
Joyce records a seaside excursion with his son, Giorgio, where the small
boy’s fear and the feel of the water brought back to Joyce’s mind a bap-
tismal image: “I held him in the sea at the baths of Fontana and felt with
humble love the trembling of his frail shoulders: Asperge[s] me, Domine,
hyssopo et mundabor: lavabis me et super nivem dealbalor” [Though shalt
sprinkle me with hyssop, O Lord, and I shall be cleansed: thou shalt wash
me and I shall be made whiter than snow].50 This same experience would
take poetic shape but lose the religious valence in his poem “On the Beach
at Fontana.”51 Just as he used biblical verses in his essays, or spoke of Nora
as a sacrament, Joyce takes forms of making meaning from his religious
upbringing and puts them to new spiritual purpose. Of course, this baptis-
mal image contrasts sharply with Joyce’s comment to Stanislaus in a letter
dated 16 October 1905: “Thanks be to the Lord Jaysus no gospeller has
put his dirty face within the bawl of an ass of him [Giorgio] yet.”52 But the
event perfectly illustrates Joyce’s approach to religion: he hated its Irish
Catholic form and wanted to take its sacred meaning into his own hands.
Joyce’s Samaritan Grace

Instead of being a singular send-up of religion, “Grace” actually showcases
a diversity of spiritual states. In “Grace,” Joyce presents in four charac-
ters, four types of spiritual meaning that draw differently—positively,
negatively, and ambiguously—on the religious resources and elements of
Christian history and contemporary Dublin. The first and most obvious
of these types is Father Purdon. Stanislaus Joyce first identified the priest
as the famous Jesuit preacher Father Bernard Vaughan and pointed out
that the name Purdon was the “old name for the street of the brothels
in Dublin.”53 If “Grace” was originally to be the back of the bookend to
Dubliners, Father Purdon would fittingly close the collection in the terms
with which it opened, the “simony” in “The Sisters.” Dubliners would
conclude with a priest prostituting the title of its last story, “Grace,” in
exchange for monetary and social capital. This would be paralysis to be
sure, and spiritual paralysis specifically, one induced by a specific under-
standing of Irish Catholicism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth
century, but not by religion generally.
The second obvious figures of religion are the Dubliners—Cunningham,
Kernan, M’Coy, Power, and Fogarty—who converse in amateur and inac-
curate detail about recent Catholic Church history, especially the First
Vatican Council and papal infallibility. The third religious figure is Mrs.
Kernan for whom religion “was a habit.”54 The narrative voice treats her
sympathetically, if ironically, as a resigned woman with “few illusions left”
and “beliefs” that were “not extravagant” but practical (yet beliefs that
could extend, if need be, to the “banshee” as well as the “Holy Ghost”).55
Her terms for spiritual life, like those of the decidedly negative Purdon
and the more comically pathetic Dublin gentlemen, are economic and
expressed in business-speak: she views their plan as a “scheme”; her own
ideas about religion again are not “extravagant” but “useful,” and she
“approved” of “all Catholic devotions and sacraments.”56 The suggestive
tautology in the section describing her beliefs, “religion was religion,”
becomes in the light ironic touch of her description Joyce’s probing
idea that “religion” should mean more than just the limits then set by
the boundaries of Catholicism. Much of this, however, is generally well
rehearsed in the criticism.
Yet, most critical accounts omit the fourth and final religious figure of
the story, that of the “young man in a cycling-suit.” Those critics who
do include him tend to discuss him only in passing or tangentially. Critics
184 J. DUDLEY
of the 1960s and 70s such as Marvin Magalaner and C.H. Peake rightly
identified his actions as a kind of Good Samaritan, but only did so in pass-
ing.57 Magalaner’s reading is short but accurate, though he leaves it to
“speculation” what the young man’s role is: he notes that it takes an “out-
sider … to play the part of the Good Samaritan,” that the young man’s
“actions are decidedly consistent with Christian religious symbolism,” that
they “recall the administration of a sacrament,” and that these actions
should remind readers of Bloom.58 Calling the story itself “parabolic,”
in a footnote on the cyclist in her Suspicious Readings of “Dubliners,”
Margot Norris describes this reading as a casual temptation (without cit-
ing Magalaner or others): “It is, of course, tempting to read the anony-
mous young man in the cycling-suit as an introduction of the parable of
the Good Samaritan—a dispenser of gratuitous assistance or grace—into
this parabolic story.”59 She is finally, however, led not into such tempta-
tion by Earl Ingersoll, whose interpretation focuses on the mobility of
the young cyclist as a symbol of his liberty. Ultimately, Norris’s cause for
rejecting the cyclist as a Good Samaritan figure because of his freedom
misses both that the Samaritan in the parable is himself a traveler, a figure
of mobility, and that Joyce aligns that mobility with the young man in a
text of otherwise paralyzed characters, because the young man is a sign of
spiritual liberation, the marker of an immanent grace that returns theology
to the biblical conceptions of community and caritas.
If the cyclist, as a whole, and the Samaritan gloss, in particular, are
so often thrown away, their indecorous treatment appropriately aligns
with Joyce’s narrative construction: the young cyclist is seemingly one
small cog in the preparatory machine of the narrative, where everything
should be subordinate to setting in motion the problem of Kernan and
the intervention of his fellow Dubliners, culminating in the send-up of
Catholicism in the story’s final pages. This young man, to borrow pro-
leptically from Ulysses, indeed acts as a kind of throwaway, a thing, akin to
epiphany, of seemingly no significance that actually holds great import: in
Ulysses, the throwaway, of course, morphs from an everyday misinterpre-
tation between Bloom and Bantam Lyons into a dominant motif for both
action and hermeneutics (what elements of Ulysses cohere and what are
simply throwaways).60 Moreover, it serves as a symbol of mobility, both
the physical mobility of the throwaway and as a symbol for the mobility
of meaning. In Dubliners, this throwaway figure actually pairs off against
the final religiously corrupt figure of Father Purdon to offer a counter-
point of virtuous action presented in narrative structured by and shot
through with religious reference to show a mode of grace that could lead
to spiritual liberation. In the actions of the cyclist, then, Joyce presents
another counterpoint concept of sincere grace (or “Grace”) paired off
against the irony saturating the grace of Father Purdon.
Joyce signals that counterpoint in the cyclist by conspicuously con-
structing nearly identical sentences that describe the initial action of the
two men. First, the young man in the cycling-suit from the story’s first few
pages: “The young man in a cycling-suit cleared his way through the ring
of bystanders. He knelt down promptly beside the injured man and called
for water.”61 Next, the description of Father Purdon from the end of the
story: “A powerful-looking figure, the upper part of which was draped
with a white surplice, was observed to be struggling up into the pulpit.
Simultaneously the congregation unsettled, produced handkerchiefs and
knelt upon them with great care.”62 The descriptions align in their struc-
ture, but follow a technique Joyce frequently uses, especially in Dubliners:
changes in direction that signal meaning or theme.
The general drift of Dubliners is, of course, eastward toward the con-
tinent, following Joyce into exile, then westward in “The Dead” toward
“the dark mutinous Shannon waves.”63 In “An Encounter,” Joyce has
the young narrator fantasize through Westerns while moving eastward
through Dublin. In “The Boarding House,” both Mr. Doran and Polly
finally go “down” the stairs or are called to “come down,”64 whereas their
affection occurred “upstairs together,”65 and Doran thinks he “longed to
ascend through the roof and fly away.”66 Even in the famous “Bird-Girl
Scene” from A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Joyce has Stephen
pass a “squad of christian brothers … on its way back,” while he himself
heads in the opposite direction, physically and spiritually.67 Just as he often
frames stories in the terms needed to understand them, Joyce signals the
directional theme conspicuously by words of orientation at the beginning
of “Grace”: “Two gentlemen who were in the lavatory at the time tried to
lift him up: but he was quite helpless. He lay curled up at the foot of the
stairs down which he had fallen.”68
Joyce modifies these directions in the two sentences from “Grace”
compared above. The young man in the cycling-suit kneels “down” to
help Kernan, whereas Father Purdon struggles to raise himself “up.”69
Purdon places himself above his congregation, above others; the young
man condescends to the fallen, to “the filth and ooze of the floor.”70 But,
the young man’s action compares too with that of Purdon’s congregation.
The congregation “knelt” with “great care” on “handkerchiefs,” whereas
186 J. DUDLEY
the young man “knelt down promptly,” in what is surely one of the most
disgusting of all places: the floor of an Irish bar in the early 1900s. The
scene enacted there is, as early critics correctly note, and contra Norris,
a reenactment of the Good Samaritan from Luke 10:29–37. Since the
parable in its original context is a critique of religious hypocrisy, it would
have been all the more appealing to Joyce for a story with the same pur-
pose. The central ethical imperative of the parable maps cleanly onto the
cyclist, who helps Kernan, while others seem to watch without assisting.
Even though Norris considers it a temptation to be resisted, the Samaritan
parable as a source text also actually confirms her “suspicious” reading of
the story. Her account famously claims that Kernan did not fall down the
steps, as the man in the cycling-suit offers as an explanation, but that he
“was deliberately pushed down by the ‘muscle’ or enforcer of his money-
lender, Mr. Harford.”71 Like Norris’s argument that Kernan is the victim
of a violent crime, the victim in the Good Samaritan parable “fell into the
hands of robbers, who stripped him, beat him, and went away, leaving him
half dead.”72 While the correlation between the two narratives, Luke and
Joyce, seems already strong, Norris’s work actually strengthens the con-
nection although she resists the reading itself.
Joyce further signals that this throwaway will be a sign of spiritual
redemption by the way the young man breaks apart the circular symbol of
Dublin damnation, which draws on the Dantean ring: “A young man in a
cycling-suit cleared his way through the ring of bystanders.”73
Circles, both real and rhetorical, fill Dubliners to reinforce and repeat
the theme of paralysis, beginning most famously with “Night after night,”
repeated twice in the opening lines of “The Sisters”74 and again in “A
Painful Case.”75 Lenehan in “Two Gallants” walks “round Stephen’s
Green,”76 and there is the repeated verse of “Clay” and its final image of a
corkscrew or Mr. O’Madden Burke’s closed, but circular umbrella at the
end of “A Mother.”77 Ulysses too takes up the theme, with Bloom thinking
of the dead at Paddy Dignam’s funeral in “Hades,” “How many! All these
here once walked round Dublin.”78 In “Grace,” Joyce turns, as he did
with the image of lost hope in “The Sisters,” to Dante, with an image of
the Dublin bar patrons as “a circle of faces” and “a ring of men,” the lat-
ter, a phrase Joyce repeats three times in the first two pages, changing the
final noun to “onlookers” and then “bystanders” to reinforce the paralysis
of the crowd.79 The ring is, of course, itself the architecture of Dante’s
Inferno—his own word is cerchio or “circle” (also translated “ring”)—and
thus a symbol of permanent paralysis in the state of damnation. This image
would draw the attention too of Eliot, who famously also uses it in The
Waste Land as a symbol of modern metropolitan monotony and futility: “I
see crowds of people, walking around in a ring” and,80 like Bloom’s “How
many!” in “Hades,” will refigure Inferno,81 “so many, / I had no thought
death had undone so many.” This reading perfectly aligns the story with
Stanislaus Joyce’s suggestion in My Brother’s Keeper that “Grace” follows
a simple structure, “inferno, purgatorio, paradiso.”82 But, Joyce has this
young man break the ring of the inferno, symbolically sundering and cut-
ting through or clearing out, the sign of paralysis and damnation.
If the two scenes, that between the young cyclist and Father Purdon,
align semantically and structurally, they invite closer scrutiny of the young
man’s apparently ordinary actions, which yield rich religious resonances
that suggest spiritual meaning. In this short throwaway, Joyce condenses
these religious references to shape the scene as not only the interven-
tion of a Good Samaritan, following one biblical precedent, but also as a
scene of Eucharist and baptism, the two central Christian sacraments. The
scene condenses the spiritual meaning Joyce hoped to achieve with his
writing: he takes from the apparatus and symbology of Christianity struc-
tures that can redeploy transcendent meaning outside the prison house of
Irish Catholicism to point toward possibilities for spiritual liberation. The
scene’s Eucharistic resonance is in using the same ingredients for the sac-
ramental blood of Christ, the young man’s call for “water” and then wine,
with a twist in “brandy,” which is, of course, distilled wine.83 The scene’s
baptismal resonance is in its image of washing—“The man washed the
blood from the injured man’s mouth”—since washing appears exactly in
the Latin for the ritual of baptism.84 As with his recitation of the Asperges
Me at the beach at Fontana, Joyce would have known the Latin from his
Catholic memory. This compressed scene in “Grace” also shows Joyce’s
making Samaritan action not only command, but set an example for the
twin sources that he so frequently depicts as paralyzing and oppressing
Dublin: Church and State, specifically, the Irish Catholic Church and the
British Empire. Joyce famously shows these forces enclosing Dublin soci-
ety in places like the last lines of Dubliners, where the snow falls “on the
crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate.”85 The
“crooked crosses” connects with “Crux upon Crux” (read: Crooks upon
Crooks) in “Grace,”86 while the spears point to imperial authority and its
violence. Joyce will famously frame Ulysses in the same terms: “Stately,
plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather
on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed,” with the story subsequently
188 J. DUDLEY
bracketed between “State”/“Stately” and “Church”/“crossed.”87 These

readings are well known, but Joyce compresses an additional one into this
brief throwaway from “Grace,” where the short paragraph describing the
young cyclist’s actions contains references to both church and state in the
“constable” and a “curate.” Of course, “curate” refers to the tenders of
the bar, but the term’s double meaning—a curate was another term for
priest—makes the young man’s order apply to both church and state, who
follow his helpful example.
In this small throwaway of the cyclist, Joyce thus condenses a baptism
and a Eucharist into the larger Good Samaritan frame. If the traditional
narrative arc of the short story usually located moral force at a work’s
conclusion, Joyce modified that form by bookending and balancing his
“Grace” between two spiritual options, two kinds of “Grace,” as it were.
Ironically, he dresses the negative one, the well-meaning but misguided
Dubliners and Father Purdon, in the conspicuous terms of organized reli-
gion and the spiritual, while describing the positive one, the cyclist, in
ordinary language that conceals its religious resonance, but a religious
resonance repurposed and reclaimed from its official sources to convey
reconceived spiritual meaning.
As with so much else, this concept of Samaritan grace stemmed from
Joyce’s own life experience and was, moreover, conditioned by his rejection
of Roman Catholic theology and its parameters for how nature and grace
should work. Ellmann recounts how during Joyce’s drunken days in 1904,
he had flirted with a woman in St. Stephens’s Green. The lady had, it turns
out, been escorted and her escort had stepped forward and given Joyce
a most thorough drubbing; Ellmann gentlemanly calls it a “skirmish.”88
Based on a letter he received from W.P. D’Arcy, who apparently heard
John Joyce tell the story, Ellmann then recounts a providential event that
followed. Joyce was saved by one Alfred H. Hunter, who “was rumored
to be Jewish and to have an unfaithful wife,” with a style, Ellmann adds,
that “Ulysses would call ‘orthodox Samaritan fashion.’”89 This account of
Wordsworthian “little, nameless, unremembered acts./Of kindness and of
love” would, as Ellmann states, become the core of Ulysses, the event that
unites two persons of the trinity, Father and Son, and returns Telemachus
to Odysseus at the end of “Circe” and the beginning of “Eumaeus.”90
If Ellmann rightly applies the event to Bloom’s rescue of Stephen in
Ulysses, it applies equally to the Samaritan intervention of “Grace,” which
Joyce wrote in October of 1905.91 If the Joycean corpus had shown little
positivity or redemption in Dublin, with the exception of the trademark
Irish hospitality in “The Dead,” Joyce’s Samaritan grace, enacted both in

Dubliners and in Ulysses as that work’s core event, demonstrates that the
central idea of redemption and liberation for Joyce was a spiritual one,
framed and described out of the material of his religious upbringing, set
to new but, nonetheless, transcendent purposes.
Notes
1. James Joyce to Stanislaus Joyce, Rome, August 31, 1906, in Letters of
James Joyce, ed. Richard Ellmann, Vol. 2 (New York: Viking, 1966), 154.
2. James Joyce, “The Sisters,” in Irish Homestead, August 13, 1904, 676.
3. James Joyce, “The Sisters,” in Irish Homestead, August 13, 1904, 676.
4. Dominic Head, The Modernist Short Story: A Study in Theory and Practice
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 37–8. See also Richard
Greaves, “Paralysis Re-considered: James Joyce’s Dubliners,” in A
Companion to the British and Irish Short Story, eds. David Malcolm and
Cheryl Alexander Malcolm (West Sussex, UK: Blackwell, 2008), 38.
5. Patrick Lonergan, “Irish Short Fiction: 1880–1945,” in A Companion to
the British and Irish Short Story, ed. David Malcolm and Cheryl Alexander
Malcolm (West Sussex, UK: Blackwell, 2008), 58.
6. Stephen Greenblatt et al., eds., Norton Anthology of English Literature,
Vol. 2, 9th ed. (New York: W.W. Norton, 2012), 2277.
Joyce, ed. Richard Ellmann, Vol. 2 (New York: Viking, 1966), 134.
Joyce, ed. Stuart Gilbert, Vol. 1 (New York: Viking, 1957), 62–63, emphasis
mine.
9. James Joyce, Stephen Hero, eds. John J. Slocum and Herbert Cahoon
(New York: New Directions, 1963), 146, emphasis mine.
10. James Joyce, Dubliners, ed. Robert Scholes and A. Walton Litz, rev ed.
(New York: Viking, 1996), 174.
11. Ibid., 151.
12. Pericles Lewis, Religious Experience and the Modernist Novel (Cambridge:
13. Ibid., 177.
14. James Joyce to Stanislaus Joyce, Trieste, May 2 or 3, 1905, in Letters of
James Joyce, ed. Richard Ellmann, Vol. 2 (New York: Viking, 1966), 89.
15. James Joyce to Nora Barnacle, Dublin, August 29, 1904, in Letters of
James Joyce, ed. Richard Ellmann, Vol. 2 (New York: Viking, 1966), 48–49.
16. Pericles Lewis, Religious Experience and the Modernist Novel; Roy
Gottfried, Joyce’s Misbelief (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 2008);
190 J. DUDLEY
and Mary Lowe-Evans, Catholic Nostalgia in Joyce and Company

(Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 2008). For an earlier discussion of
Joyce and mysticism specifically, see Colleen Jaurretche, Joyce and Mysticism
(Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1998).
17. Sharon Kim, Literary Epiphany in the Novel, 1850–1950, 6.
18. Ibid., 319.
19. Andrew Gibson, The Strong Spirit: History, Politics and Aesthetics in the
2013), 4.
20. Ibid., 2.
21. Geert Lernout, Help My Unbelief: James Joyce and Religion (New York:
Continuum, 2010), 6.
22. Richard Ellmann, “Prologue: Two Perspectives on Joyce,” in Light Rays:
James Joyce and Modernism, ed. Heyward Ehrlich (New York: New
Horizon Press Publishers, 1984), 66.
23. Lernout, Help, 5, emphasis mine.
24. Ibid., 4.
25. Ibid.
26. See note 23.
27. Jill Shashaty, “Reading Dubliners Parabolically,” James Joyce Quarterly 47,
no. 2 (2010), 213–229.
28. Vicki Mahaffey and Jill Shashaty, introduction to Collaborative “Dubliners”:
Joyce in Dialogue, ed. Vicki Mahaffey (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press,
2012), 14.
29. When Ellmann used the term, he might very well have meant secular in a
more specific and earlier sense to mean not the negation of religion, but to
purposes outside religion’s domain, as in the origin of the term in the
phrase “secular clergy,” those clergy who worked outside the confines of
the monastery in the world.
30. I have elsewhere shown how Joyce developed this model in tension with
the theology of his time and how it determined his concept of epiphany.
See Jack Dudley, “What the Thunder Said: A Portrait of the Artist as a
Trans-Secular Event,” in Literature and Theology 28.4 (2014): 457–475.
31. James Joyce to Henrik Ibsen, Dublin, March 1901, in Letters of James
Joyce, ed. Stuart Gilbert, Vol. 1 (New York: Viking, 1957), 52.
32. James Joyce, “Drama and Life,” in Occasional, Critical, and Political

Writing, ed. Kevin Barry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 25.
33. Stanislaus Joyce, My Brother’s Keeper: James Joyce’s Early Years, ed. Richard
Ellmann (New York: Da Capo, 2003), 104, emphasis mine.
34. James Joyce, Stephen Hero, 211, emphasis mine.
35. James Joyce to Grant Richards, Trieste, June 23, 1906, in Letters of James
Joyce, ed. Stuart Gilbert, Vol. 1 (New York: Viking, 1957), 63.
36. James Joyce, Exiles, in The Portable James Joyce, ed. Harry Levin (New
York: Penguin, 1976), 613, emphasis mine.
37. Ibid., 63.
38. Joyce, Stephen Hero, 142, emphasis mine.
39. Kim, Literary Epiphany in the Novel, 1850–1950, 145.
40. James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, ed. Seamus Deane
(New York: Penguin, 2000), 113, emphasis mine.
41. Ibid., 137.
42. Ibid., 140.
43. Ibid., 143.
44. Ibid., 159.
45. Ibid., 160.
46. Ibid., 162.
47. Ibid., 231, emphasis mine.
49. James Joyce to Stanislaus Joyce, Rome, February 14, 1907, in Letters of
James Joyce, Vol. 2, 213–214.
50. James Joyce, “Trieste Notebook,” in The Workshop of Daedalus, eds.

Robert Scholes and Richard M. Kain (Evanston, IL: Northwestern UP,
1965), 99.
51. James Joyce, “On the Beach at Fontana,” in Pomes Penyeach, in The

Portable James Joyce, ed. Harry Levin (New York: Penguin, 1976), 651–2.
52. James Joyce to Stanislaus Joyce, Trieste, October 16, 1905, in Letters of
James Joyce, Vol. 2, 124.
53. Stanislaus Joyce, Brother’s Keeper, 228.
55. Ibid., 158.
56. Ibid.
57. Marvin Magalaner, Time of Apprenticeship: The Fiction of Young James Joyce
(London, New York, Toronto: Abelard-Schuman, 1959), 131; and C. H.
Peake, James Joyce: The Citizen and the Artist (Stanford: Stanford University
Press, 1977), 43.
58. Magalaner, Time of Apprenticeship, 131.
59. Margot Norris, Suspicious Readings of Joyce’s “Dubliners,” 252n2.
60. James Joyce, Ulysses, ed. Hans Walter Gabler et al. (New York: Random
House, 1986), 5.534.
61. Joyce, Dubliners, 151, emphasis mine.
63. Ibid., 223.
64. Ibid., 67, 69.
65. Ibid., 67.
66. Ibid.
192 J. DUDLEY
67. Joyce, A Portrait, 179.

68. Joyce, Dubliners, 150, emphasis mine.
69. Ibid., 151, 173.
70. Ibid., 150.
71. Norris, Suspicious Readings, 197.
72. Luke 10:30.
73. 151, emphasis mine.
75. Ibid., 116.
76. Ibid., 56.
77. Ibid., 106.
78. Joyce, Ulysses, 6.960.
80. T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land, in The Complete Poems and Plays:
1909–1950 (New York: Harcourt, 1980), line 56.
81. Joyce, Ulysses, 62–3. Dante, Inferno, ed. and trans. Anthony Esolen (New
York: Modern Library, 2005), 3.55–7.
82. Stanislaus Joyce, Brother’s Keeper, 228.
84. Ibid.
85. Ibid., 223–224.
86. Ibid., 167.
87. Joyce, Ulysses, 1.1–1.2.
88. Richard Ellmann, “Prologue: Two Perspectives on Joyce,” in Light Rays:
James Joyce and Modernism, ed. Heyward Ehrlich (New York: New
Horizon Press Publishers, 1984), 161.
89. Ibid., 161n51.
90. William Wordsworth, “Lines written a few miles above Tintern Abbey,” in
Wordsworth’s Poetry and Prose, ed. Nicholas Halmi, Norton Critical Edition
(New York: W. W. Norton, 2014), lines 35–6.
91. Ellmann, “Prologue,” 207.
Bibliography
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New York: Harcourt, 1980.
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––––––. James Joyce. Revised edition. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983.
Gibson, Andrew. The Strong Spirit: History, Politics and Aesthetics in the Writings
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as a Young Man.” 2nd ed. Oakland: University of California Press, 1992.
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Cheryl Alexander Malcolm, 165–173. West Sussex, UK: Blackwell, 2008.
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––––––. Letters of James Joyce. Edited by Richard Ellmann. Vol. 2. New York:
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––––––. “On the Beach at Fontana.” In Pomes Penyeach. In The Portable James
Joyce, edited by Harry Levin (New York: Penguin, 1976), 651–2.
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Critical Edition. New York: W. W. Norton, 2014.
CHAPTER 11
Men in Slow Motion: Male Gesture in “Two

Gallants”
Enda Duffy
If you compare the two Dubliners stories “After the Race” and “Two
Gallants” with the extraordinary silent-film epic Cabiria, made in Turin
by Giovanni Pastrone a few years after Joyce wrote his stories in Trieste,
you notice that the obsession of both is an almost delighted gaze upon
human movement and the stylization of such movement in gesture. All
three are stories of men in movement. “Two Gallants” and Cabiria each
focus on a pair of men who differ in gesture and physique. Despite the
heaped-up plot twists of Cabiria and the tantalizing ambiguities of Joyce
(which in Cabiria feels like a parody of melodrama, and in the Dubliners
stories, a parody of “well-bred” reticence), one senses that neither sto-
ries nor film cares much about these plots, except as stratagems to hold
their audiences. While the plots confuse us, their creators lay out extended
panoramas of the physical movements of pairs of men shown in each case
moving across extended landscapes, their movement-gestures assem-
bled into a code whose meanings we are incited to identify. In Cabiria,1
Pastrone, with his camera operator, Segundo de Chamón, invented the
tracking shot: the camera, on rails, could now move around the characters
E. Duffy (*)
Department of English, University of California, Santa Barbara,
Santa Barbara, CA, USA
e-mail: duffy@english.ucsb.edu

DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-39336-0_11
196 E. DUFFY
being filmed to capture their gestures in three dimensions, and the move-
ment of the camera could match the characters’ movements. In Dubliners,
Joyce’s mimetic style experiments with ways in which gestures can be best
annotated. Here is writing from the moment of film’s invention: the nar-
rative gaze moves over the characters, or, as in film, lets us grasp that we
are seeing the scene through one of the characters’ eyes.
Omniscient narrative is forgone in favor of a transcription of the visible
that invites us to read the characters’ gestures. In Dubliners, Joyce writes
as a movie camera films. Here, I track the meaning of the code of gestures
we are shown in “Two Gallants.”
The philosopher Giorgio Agamben has written: “By the end of the
nineteenth century, the Western bourgeoisie had definitely lost its ges-
tures.”2 He cites a sequence of nineteenth-century scientific observations
of this phenomenon: the photographic sequences of Eadweard Muybridge
and Jules Marey, both of whom took revolutionary photo sequences of
human movement, and the experiments by Gilles de la Tourette. He might
have added the recording of involuntary human gestures by such pioneer
physiologists as Angelo Mosso and Walter Canon.3 From Muybridge and
Marey, Agamben moves to cinema, which he sees as an archive of the ges-
tures being lost and the medium par excellence where the new jitteriness,
the end of some accepted gestural style, was recorded. Agamben does not
explain why this massive crisis of gesturality occurred. Given his interest,
however, in what in Homo Sacer he calls “bare life,” he clearly regards
human gestures as “forms of life,” public aesthetic acts the human subject
performs upon his or her own body. Signs of breakdown of this bodily
style are therefore, to him, indexical of a crisis of politics, of life lived in
a community. The modernist subject’s loss of gesture is to him tragic, a
signifier of communitas in crisis.
At the end of Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Stephen
Dedalus notes in his diary:
Met her today pointblank in Grafton Street …. Asked me, was I writing
poems? About whom? I asked her. This confused her more and I felt sorry
and mean. Turned off that valve at once and opened the spiritual-heroic
refrigerating apparatus, invented and patented in all countries by Dante
Alighieri. Talked rapidly of myself and my plans. In the midst of it unluckily
I made a sudden gesture of a revolutionary nature. I must have looked like
a fellow throwing a handful of peas into the air. People began to look at us.4
MEN IN SLOW MOTION 197
This offers exactly the kind of evidence Agamben could use to support his
thesis: a portrait of a young bourgeois who, around 1900, has lost control
of his gestures. More, Joyce refuses to tell us exactly what the gesture was,
apart from the tantalizing simile of the tossed peas. (Peas also accompany
gestural endings in “Two Gallants.”) In a real sense, A Portrait has been
leading up to this paragraph: the whole book is an account of how a young
Irishman gradually shed all of his gestures. By the novel’s end, Stephen
presents himself on the streets of Dublin, vaguely aware of his desires but
unable to marshal the physical control over his body movements to ful-
fill them. He has become the kind of character, cited by Agamben, who
Oliver Sacks noted in New York in 1971, people so twitch-limbed that
they seem in the grip of Tourette’s syndrome.5 Joyce’s engagement with
gesture did not end here: since Ulysses opens as a sequel to A Portrait,
this “gesture of a revolutionary nature” may be the originating riddle that
propels Ulysses. That book is an encyclopedia of modernist gesture, from
Buck Mulligan’s opening parodic power-gesture of imitating the priest
at mass, to the no less real gesture practiced by Molly in the dark at the
novel’s end. For Agamben’s thesis on gesture, Joyce’s oeuvre provides a
massive archive.
Before Ulysses as gestural encyclopedia and A Portrait as an account
of how one bourgeois lost his gestures, in Dubliners, as Joyce himself
claimed, the key trope is “paralysis,” that is, the inability to perform ges-
tures you would like to perform. With paralysis, Joyce took the term for
the human body’s inability to move, and applied it to the whole culture.
In Dubliners, paralyzed characters effect physical movement in a para-
lyzed city only with the most strenuous, agonizing, muscle-wrenching
effort. Theirs is movement as through some dense medium. Thus, any
gesture noted in the stories, revolutionary or not, jittery or controlled,
will be invested with extraordinary significance. In Dubliners, gesture, as
the overcoming of paralysis, has the level of significance assigned to ges-
tures shown in slow motion in film. (Slow motion was invented by August
Musger, who patented a mirror-drum in 1904 and displayed the effect in
1907). Look upon us, the gestures imply, we alone amidst the detritus of
a paralytic city are “forms of life,” bids for freedom. Dubliners stories have
a Futurist cast: they implicitly posit movement—if not movement at the
speeds that the Futurists admired—as the utopian dream of escape from a
gruesomely static city. Joyce did not hate Dublin with the lurid loathing
Marinetti brought to Venice; yet for both, the dead city could only be
countered by human movement, that is, by gesture.
198 E. DUFFY
The most Futurist stories in Dubliners are “After the Race” and “Two
Gallants.” “After the Race,” like Marinetti’s “Futurist Manifesto,” deals
with speeding cars. Both stories, with characteristic Futurist chauvin-
ism, implying that a young bourgeois male camaraderie rules the public
sphere. As with Futurist writing, both concern the stylization of move-
ment in gesture. In “After the Race,” the pathos-producing contrast is
between the aerodynamic and modern speed of the racing cars and the
slowness, approaching inertia, of the Irish spectators and hangers-on.
“Two Gallants” also contrasts two gestural speeds: one extends through
the story and the other takes only a moment.
The first is the extended, repeated, rhythmic gesture of the two charac-
ters’ gait. Crossing Dublin from Rutland Square to Merrion Square, they
are boulevardiers, flaneurs who in a peripheral European city practice the
most characteristic modernist cosmopolitan gesture, that of walking. This
walk makes for a rhythmic gesturality that marks the time of the story like
a metronome. The contrasting gesture (even though performed slowly)
depends for its effect on speed, and it is one of the most notoriously enig-
matic gestures in Joyce’s oeuvre. In a cardsharp’s sleight of hand, Corley
flicks his wrist and opens his palm before this friend’s eyes to show the
coin. Corley, either good materialist or hard-headed capitalist, shows that
money is behind all movement: the magic revealing moment (“Show me
the money”) ends all gesture. Yet, Corley’s gesture is enigmatic, because
it is fast and shocking. What does that fast gesture mean, and what does
the fast driving of the race-cars mean, in “After the Race”? Both are left
unexplained, but the contrasting, slowed-down, lugubrious gestures, the
syncopated gait of the two pedestrians in “Two Gallants,” and the weary
gestures of Doyle in “After the Race” are detailed extensively. Joyce, it
appears, wants fast gesture, to counter the paralysis he diagnosed in Dublin.
Yet, if the fast gestures seem more malicious, because more potent, it is
the slow ones we are shown in detail. Each story is a speed trap marking
contrasting gestural speeds; clocking the relative speeds, we can grasp the
possible choreography of meanings in each text.
Both “After the Race” and “Two Gallants” are stories of young men
in motion at different speeds. The base note of every Dubliners story
is a horror of slowness. Every story is about slow lives, and this slow-
ness is registered, invariably, as an insidious horror. In chronicling slow-
ness as horrifying, Dubliners compares to “The Love Song of J. Alfred
Prufrock” and to the plays of Anton Chekhov, except that Joyce’s version
of Dublin’s slowness is shorn of the lingering nostalgia that sweetens the
hours in Chekhov, or the noir glamour that seeps into Eliot’s slow night
world. In Eliot and Chekhov, slowness still has some of the pleasure,
of, say, Erik Satie’s Gnossiennes: it dilates and savors time, and this is
registered in the literary style. In Dubliners, slowness is the opening into
the black hole of paralysis; it is never a pleasure, not even a masochistic
one. It is also, in Dubliners, the correlative to a vague, pervasive sense
of inadequate masculinity. In modernity, the “need for speed” has been
cast as mostly the desire of men. Slowness, in every one of the stories, is
literally cast as weak. In “Two Gallants,” two weak men in motion try to
assemble their movements into a recognizable gesture. The achievement
of gesture, then, gets offered as a prerequisite for the identification of a
valid masculinity. Are gestures here, then, and throughout Joyce’s writ-
ing, coded as inherently male?
In everyday life, gestures are often read in gendered terms. A late
nineteenth-century cult of exaggerated female gesture, for example, as
employed by the opera diva and by early stars such as Eleonora Duse, was
around 1900 transformed into a style of flowing gesturality by dancers such
as Loie Fuller (and, in the thirties, by Joyce’s daughter, Lucia). A pastiche
of “divismo” became the exotic gesturality of emerging subculture figures
contesting gender stereotypes at the border between high and emerging
popular culture; the most famous was the great Dublin writer who pre-
ceded Joyce, Oscar Wilde. These developments register cultural contests
of gesture on the eve of what Agamben characterizes as its disappear-
ance. The hegemonic male gesture system at the same moment, on the
contrary, appears to have renounced any kind of ostentatious gesturality,
substituting for it a stiff reserve. The “stiff upper lip,” signifier of a specifi-
cally British late-imperial masculinity, appeared in P.C. Wren’s novel about
British pluck, Beau Geste, of 1924 (“Beau geste” means “fine gesture”); its
origins can be traced to earlier American usage. Along with this reserve,
around 1900, male gesture began to be showcased in highly regimented
forms in the public sphere. Baden-Powell’s Scouting for Boys, a compendium
of salutes, marching drills, and gestures, appeared in 1908; spectator sports,
with codes of rules and scripted gestures, were rapidly being organized (the
Olympic Games were revived in 1896); Ransom Olds patented the idea of
the assembly line in 1901, so that factory work was calibrated as a sequence
of regimented gestures. Military parades have long regimented male ges-
ture as nationalist spectacle. Possibilities for male gesture, then, as index of
emotion or individuality, were narrowly limited; the conditions for effectual
paralysis in a male-dominated public sphere were fully in place. Any writer,
200 E. DUFFY
including Joyce, whose topic was male gesture, had around 1900 a narrow
range to work with. Joyce’s stories, like the Futurist manifestos but less
vehemently, represent a pushback against the shutting-down of male ges-
ture. To take his fight against paralysis into the open in these stories, Joyce’s
young male characters have got to move.
If gender matters to gesture, nationality matters to it even more. Are
there national gestural styles? Assuredly, yes. Here we return to the by
now well-worn questions of the significance of Joyce’s Irishness. Does it
matter in Dubliners that Dublin is Irish, or could we be reading much the
same stories under the name of any other edge-of-Europe minor capital:
Helsinkians, Budapestians, Athenians, Bilbaoans, Glaswegians? Yeats cer-
tainly came to understand that the project of artistic national regeneration
must involve the invention of a new national gestural repertoire: he called
his collection of Noh-inspired Irish mythic plays Four Plays for Dancers.
However, if nationalism in its nineteenth-century European incarnation
was an avowedly bourgeois ideology, then we might guess that the emerg-
ing Irish Catholic “native” middle class had long been working on their
gestural repertoire themselves. The difficulty of this task in the Irish or any
subaltern context needs to be noted. First, the racism that underlay British
discourse on the Irish was cast as aspersions on their gestures and on the
related issue of their posture: they were shown as groveling, unsteady, or
as the purveyors of a servile mimicry of their betters’ gestures. Books such
as Some Experiences of an Irish R.M. (1899) and Further Experiences of an
Irish R.M. (1908) by Somerville and Ross are comic compendiums of such
Irish peasant and servant gestures. When the new Catholic middle class,
likewise, was attacked as nouveau-riche, it was often their gestures that were
ridiculed: the Trinity Provost J. Pentland Mahaffy said of the author of
Dubliners that “James Joyce is a living argument in defense of my conten-
tion that it was a mistake to establish a separate university for the aborigines
of this island – for the corner boys who spit into the Liffey.”6 Even the
statues of Irish figures erected in nineteenth-century Dublin betray the new
Catholic middle class’s lack of gestural confidence: consider Ulysses’s atten-
tion to “Moore’s roguish finger.” The statue of Thomas Moore does sport
a “roguish finger”—hint of the cuckolder, perhaps, and also of the writer
holding his pen—perfect exemplar of the gestural difficulties of the new
Irish bourgeoisie. Agamben’s line about the bourgeoisie losing its gestures
has a particular resonance for the Irish, since the Irish “native” bourgeoi-
sie, recently developed, had only by 1900 begun to have the confidence to
generate its own awkward gestural repertoire.
“Two Gallants” is a story about Irish male bourgeois gesture toward the
end of the colonial era. Readings of this story often become enmeshed in
its inscrutability; they cannot help but be tormented by its mystery. Where
did the young woman get the gold coin? Why is Lenehan so interested
in the success of the plan Corley outlined to him? The answers to these
questions are as follows: first, the young woman, a servant, is persuaded by
Corley to steal the coin from her employer,7 and, second, Lenehan’s inter-
est in this scheme is spurred by the expectation that Corley will buy him
a drink to celebrate.8 That is all. Mystery as such is hardly the story’s con-
cern, even if little of the suspense is assuaged by Corley’s final revelation
of the coin. Perhaps, therefore, as by a cardsharp, we are being diverted
when the truth of the scenario is before us all the while. The narrative,
instead, offers a realism in which the visible scenes and snatches of con-
versation are reported to us. Because Joyce was honing here what Kenner
would call “the Uncle Charles Principle,” by which the thoughts on the
visible scene are filtered through the sensibility of one of the characters
even if the passage is written in the third person, the perspective is often
“through Lenehan’s eyes.” In general, however, the narrative focuses on
what is observable on the surface, so what we are doing as readers is close
to the work of the viewer of the new medium of the day, silent film: we are
judging the reported gestures of the characters to divine their meaning.
The enigmatic plot works as a cover for a display of a sequence of gestures,
which we get to observe as the male characters are set in motion. The
question is, what does this motion imply?
In their thought-provoking essay on “Two Gallants”—“En Garde:
‘Two Gallants’”—Marilyn Reizbaum and Maud Ellmann offer a brilliant
reading of the “slavey’s” leer:
Her “straggling mouth,” lying “open in a contented leer,” reminds us of

what Molly calls “the hole in the middle” of the female body, the genital and
ontological abyss that threatens the disappointed bridges between men ….
Lying open, her mouth resembles the gaping mouth of Munch’s painting
The Scream (1893), a vacuum that seems to be engulfing its surroundings,
as Mladen Dolar comments on this painting …. The slavey’s open mouth
is equally vertiginous, since we never learn the meaning of the leer, and it is
from this vacuum that every inference unravels, leaving all the questions of
the story lying open …. The leer implies that … the slavey has something
up her sleeve.9
202 E. DUFFY
The critics here do what the story demands: they take gesture utterly seri-
ously. A leer is a subtle gesture, an alignment of the facial muscles around
a straggling mouth accompanied by a narrowing of the eyes. The crit-
ics also, appropriately, end by associating the slavey with the language
of magic (“Something up her sleeve”) because a magician is all and only
gesture, though all the while pretending to a “deeper” or secret meaning.
Yet why—as the critics do—take gesture this seriously only to conclude
that it is indecipherable, and so can only betoken an “ontological abyss”?
Why are we not allowed to read the mouth’s straggling O as we would any
other semiotic system? At the end of this essay, we will return to read the
many leers, laughs, and smiles in the story.
Reizbaum and Ellmann suggest that it is because the slavey does not
speak that her gesture is indecipherable. The story teases us, however,
because the two male characters don’t really speak either: Lenehan’s tale
that “takes the proverbial biscuit” has been told before we can overhear
it, and, for the rest, it’s mostly Lenehan’s benighted questions: “Will you
bring it off?” As in silent cinema, the only sound we hear is provided by the
murmuring crowd and by the musical accompaniment, here the plaintive
“Silent, O Moyle” played on the harp, which so affects the two gallants in
Kildare St. Thus, as in silent film, we are forced to read the gestures that
we see in our mind’s eye.10 By becoming aware of that perspective from
which the narrative chooses to display these gestures to us, we can decode
the story’s gestural grammar.
In the opening of “Two Gallants,” Agamben’s claim that around 1900
the bourgeoisie lost its gestures often seems to be the thesis being borne
out. The uncanny, warping effect of Joyce’s scrupulously mean naturalism
perfectly displays characters who find themselves shorn of ease, jittery,
nervous and possessed of unbeautiful bodies that fidget and fret. In the
opening paragraph, the reader’s unease about whether the repetition and
accretion of “grey warm … warm air … warm grey evening air”11 is a
homage to the Pateresque decadent style or a parody of it sets the stage
for the jitteriness noted in Corley and Lenehan. (The opening overwriting
makes us nervous.) Before we meet them, the text directs our mind’s eye
to the lighting, key to visibility, and offers us if not an aerial view, at least
one from above:
Like illuminated pearls the lamps shone from the summits of their tall poles
upon the living texture below which, changing shape and hue unceasingly,
sent up into the warm grey evening air an unchanging unceasing murmur.12
We begin that sentence looking up at the pearly lamps above us, and end
it by looking down from a great height at the crowd. The aerial perspec-
tive casts the city almost as an organism which, “changing shape and hue
unceasingly,” almost possesses a Bergsonian aura of flow (Henri Bergson
published Matter and Memory in 1896, Creative Evolution in 1907). Our
attention is first drawn to the heat, the artificial lighting, and that most
modern of concerns, the urban crowd. The repeated references to warmth
raise the matter of one’s physical affect; the lamps raise the matter of what
we will be allowed to see; the mention of the “living texture below” raises
the following question: can the crowd exhibit decipherable gestures? The
answer, it seems, is that it cannot: its “murmur” is white noise, “unceas-
ingly … unchanging … unceasing.” In other words, the crowd’s gesture
rather than the slavey’s straggling leer, is the gesture that, from the outset,
marks the boundary of epistemological legibility for the text. The impli-
cation is that the crowd will remain an “inoperative community.” We are
implicitly directed to read only the gestures of individual characters.
Here, the fidgeting of nervous Irish bodies begins. Lenehan “walked on
the verge of the path and was at times obliged to step on to the road, owing
to his companion’s rudeness.” Even stranger, as the viewfinder zooms up
close, we are told, “The narrative to which he listened made constant
waves of expression break forth over his face from the corners of his eyes
and mouth. Little jets of wheezing laughter followed one another out of
his convulsed body.”13 This close-up trawl over the dynamically flowing
contours of a face finds its antecedents less in literature than in Charles
Darwin’s The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals of 1872.
No actual emotions are named here; rather, the dynamic architecture of
the facial muscles is annotated to provide us with evidence from which
we can impute an emotional reaction ourselves. Next, the mimetic gaze
shows it can outdo the surreal: the “jets of wheezing laughter” make the
reader imagine Lenehan’s body as a fountain, a gas-light, bagpipes, or a
punchbag, from which his breath issues as laughter. His “convulsed body”
takes the iconography of the hunched Irish male terrorist figure of the
Punch cartoons14 and recreates it as an instrument deeply attuned to, and
reactive to, stimuli as it wheezes jets of laughter. This body as bag of wind,
grotesquely convulsed, is indeed, to recall Reizbaum and Ellmann’s image,
a literary version of the character on the bridge in Munch’s “The Scream,”
a vision of the human subject as a body so fully pummeled, penetrated, and
blown through by the forces of the world that its only gestural reaction is
a wheezing, convulsed expulsion of air. The wheezing laughter here can in
204 E. DUFFY
no way be read as a sign of humor, comedy, merriment, or carnival. Rather,

the corporeal convulsion is a sign of a state beyond hysteria, for hysteria
would betoken a breakdown of control in an already existing subject. It
cannot even be classed as a pathological reaction, as the wheezing caused by
asthma would be, for example. Instead, it presents us with an Irish subject
who exists wholly as a reactive organism. One thinks of Wilheim Flusser’s
vampire squid,15 or of Deleuze and Guattari’s “body without organs,” here
imagined in advance in literature. Lenehan, at the opening of this story, is a
body that has so completely lost its gestures, a blank skin crossed by waves
of expression which leaks air, that the human subject it envelops seems
barely to exist as such.
Nevertheless, Lenehan does not quite embody the epistemological
impossibility that was ascribed in the opening paragraph to the flowing
crowd. The task of the story will be to imbue this envelope of air with a
tincture of individual subjectivity. It will pursue this first through a close
look at any signs of gestural style that he exhibits. As of yet, it is the enve-
lope of air and not any subject that is capable of gesture: we hear that
“his figure fell into rotundity at the waist.” And language will not save
him: “His tongue was tired.” Exhaustion is the physical state pervading
Lenehan’s aliveness (later we see him so weary from walking that even
stopping to stand and talk feels like rest), but again, he does not have
an adequate sense of unified subjecthood even to feel his own tiredness,
and it is his muscles, we are told, that are tired. “No one knew how he
achieved the stern task of living” the text tells us, and we might take that
to refer merely to gossip about the fact that he is unemployed, and his lack
of what he calls “the ready.” Yet it’s also a philosophic statement about
the way in which subjectivity sustains life, and how, without one, Lenehan,
close to “bare-life” in Agamben’s terms, can only barely be imagined to
exist as a human subject at all.
Yet, Lenehan’s body without organs can only be conceptualized in rela-
tion to its contrast, that of Corley’s. Throughout Joyce’s writing, per-
haps the most characteristic scenes show a pair of perambulating men.
If Lenehan’s is an almost wholly reactive, convulsing body, Corley’s, au
contraire, is characterized by its stiffness, which grants it a grotesque
marionette-like quality:
Corley’s stride acknowledged the compliment. The swing of his burly body ….
Corley was the son of an inspector of police and he had inherited his father’s
frame and gait. He walked with his hands at his sides, holding himself erect
and swaying his head from side to side. His head was large, globular and oily;
it sweated in all weathers; and his large brown hat, set upon it sideways, looked
like a bulb that had grown out of another. He always stared straight before
him as if he were on parade and, when he wished to gaze after someone in the
street, it was necessary for him to move his body from the hips.16
Bergson, in Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic, claims that

we laugh because we perceive fake, machine-like imitations of our own
movements; here, we laugh, and are horrified. Corley is observed under
two headings here: his gait, and his sweat. His policeman’s gait is that of
the automaton, or the Frankenstinian monster or sci-fi replicant. The gait
is a crucial zone of modernist gesture, because flanerie, strolling in the
city, is the most characteristic modernist kind of movement. Balzac, with
his Theory of the Gait in 1838, inaugurated the modern attention to styles
of walking, and here Joyce carefully lays out one such style, where the
walker is “holding himself erect and swaying his head from side to side.”
Needing to move his body from his hips while he stares, Corley’s stiffness
suggests that he does not lack emotions, or at least desires, but he lacks the
gestures to express them. His stiffness is the opposite of Lenehan’s con-
vulsions, but is equally extreme. If Lenehan’s convulsed body was that of
the wild Irishman invented by the British, but here brought to its logical
extreme, Corley’s stiff torso is the Irishman’s version of the British male
“stiff upper lip,” now applied to the whole body. By refusing gesture as his
modus of manufacturing subjectivity, Corley stunts any emotional life he
might develop. The stress of this stunting (Freud would call it repression)
is amply suggested by Corley’s sweat, and by the horrific vision of the
organicist simile used to describe the hat on his head, which “looked like
a bulb which had grown out of another.” The bowler hat and stiff upper
lip go together as symbols of late Victorian British male reserve; here, the
whole body, stiffened beyond gesture, turns the hat into an excrescence.
Corley is, in the language of his day, a bounder; as such he resembles
Blazes Boylan in Ulysses, and with him, shares a certain masculinist drive.
Such energy is muted, however, because Corley, as much as Lenehan, has
gesture trouble. He is not silent; streams of language, rather than jets
of laughter, issue from him. But the stories fall flat as the animation of
gesture is denied them. The action man cannot be the emotional man
because as an Irish bourgeois, his chosen option is imitation of the British
male middle-class refusal of all gesture, a refusal which, in the Irish imita-
tion, emerges as grotesque.
206 E. DUFFY
Bourgeois gesture, Irish gesture, masculine gesture—this story defamil-

iarizes them all, and shows that for the two male characters they are lost
causes. First, they become perverse listeners-to and watchers-of the harp,
strategically placed before the Kildare St. club, bastion of British landlord
prestige in Ireland, and then of the young woman at the corner of Stephen’s
Green, who, in her “blue dress and white sailor hat … sunshade … her
Sunday finery,”17 is a figure out of the upstairs-downstairs world of a John
Galsworthy novel, a figure wholly presented within class-ridden codes of
cheap consumerism and “keeping up appearances,” which, in the Irish con-
text, were apt to be coded as British. Thus, the women in the story—the
harp, metaphorically feminized, and then the slavey—are compared and
contrasted with each other at the center of the text. This contrast, complex
yet pointed, offers a full-scale analysis of how gender relations are perverted
in a late-colonial society. The harp is feminized within the idiom of Irish
nationalist culture. Some of the issues suggested by that symbolization are
these: that Irish femininity can only be imagined through a nationalist dis-
course, yet such a discourse cannot bring into its imaginary a real woman,
but merely an object that is feminized. In other words, the success of the
metaphor of the harp as woman depends on a subaltern reification of real
women as symbols. The story’s beautiful description of the harp traps us
into acknowledging this with the following sentence: “His harp too, heed-
less that her coverings had fallen about her knees, seemed weary alike of
the eyes of strangers and of her master’s hands.” This is especially evoca-
tive because it follows the logic that in a story about human gestures, an
object can only be of interest if it is read as gesturing too. It is as if the harp
is being reprimanded for refusing to gesture, for its heedlessness—for its
utter, unguarded subalternity. Then, when “the eyes of strangers” and “her
master’s hands” are paralleled, our looking, which the story has incited us to
do, and gestures—those of the harpist—are equated. Yet the harpist’s heart-
less, pornographic touch, in fact, makes a haunting, beautiful music—“The
notes of the air throbbed deep and full”—and this implies that this gesture,
grim as it is, may be the only way forward for the creation of beauty. The
gesture made by the harpist’s hands, presented as sexual violation, is the
touchstone gesture at the heart of the story. However, it is also paralleled
soon after with the way Corley “plays” the slavey, and it is also echoed by
Lenehan, as he imitates the harpist by running his fingers along the railings
of the Duke’s lawn. The whole symbolically freighted tableau suggests that
for late-colonial Irishmen, heteronormative desire for another Irish person is
literally impossible, as Irishness can only be transferred into symbols, which

can then be thought of as woman-like. Finally, as an object, the harp fore-
shadows the other object in this story, the “small gold coin.”
The sexuality in this story, therefore, has every bit of the complex per-
versity which Frantz Fanon in The Wretched of the Earth describes as result-
ing from the ressentiment-ridden masculinity of colonized Algerian men.
Corley and Lenehan can only see the young servant woman outside of any
code of Irish nationalist discourse. She cannot be Fionnula, Lir’s daugh-
ter in “Silent, O Moyle,” and that music must be out of earshot before
their perverse hoodwinking of the slavey—a women othered, paradoxi-
cally, through codes of Britishness and codes of slavery—can begin. So
why does the story have the nationalist interlude of the harp—one which
implies that the symbolic woman of nationalism is treated in as degraded a
manner as the slavey will be treated moments later? The interlude contrasts
with, but also parallels, the confrontation with the real young woman, to
which it is a prelude. It even implies that a subtle, unconscious national-
ist ressentiment underlies the two young men’s approach to the servant.
They can at best read her within the codes of cosmopolitan class emplace-
ment (“She thinks I’m a bit of class” says Corley), which in Ireland at this
time tended to be coded British. (Think of Yeats’s “September 1913,” in
which “to fumble in a greasy till” is presented as the antithesis of Irish
national pride). This means that Corley’s hoodwinking by the Irishman
of the woman, subtly coded as British, has a slight tinge of nationalist
revenge about it. This is even more bitterly ironic as Corley is the son of
a policeman and probably an informer himself, at a time when the police
were seen as British agents in Ireland. Thus, when Corley wins the coin
from the woman (if that is in fact what happened), it feels significant in
part because it also parallels and, in a way, reverses the coin he may have
been given as a traitor for giving information to plain-clothes policemen.
The apparent vileness of what he has done here is overlain with a flickering
sense that he has not only put something over on her, but on the British
order of things in Ireland as well. This in no sense mitigates what he has
done; on the contrary, as it resembles his informing (presumably for mon-
etary rewards), it in fact further complicates its grimness. Yet, it shows
how deeply nationalism is implicated even in a zone as intimate as human
sexuality, especially in the late-imperial city.
In this tangled web of sex and nation, one point is clear: neither the ser-
vant woman nor the harp imagined as woman gets to move. (That is why
it is so shocking when the slavey runs down the house steps at the story’s
208 E. DUFFY
end.) They are both almost wholly denied gesture. Thus, any untangling
of the web that does occur is left to the gallants themselves and in the main
to Lenehan. In the final third of the story, Lenehan once again is set in
motion. It is by reading his gestures, as he, now a singular flaneur, more or
less repeats the circuit of the city already made by the two, that we can take
the measure of the perverse gesturality already set before us in the text.
Once Lenehan is set off on his lone flanerie, he joins all the other lonely
flaneurs of modernism, from Prufrock in T.S. Eliot’s poem to K in Kafka’s
The Castle (begun in 1922) to Clarissa in Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway (1925).
The new medium of film, however, produced the most famous flaneur of
all, when Charlie Chaplin debuted the Little Tramp in two film shorts,
Mabel’s Strange Predicament and Kid Auto Races in Venice, in 1914. In
that year, Joyce began work on the book that presented high modernism’s
best-known flaneur, when he set Leopold Bloom to walk through Dublin
in Ulysses. Lenehan in “Two Gallants” presages both the Little Tramp and
Leopold Bloom, and, as with each of them, the truth of his confrontation
with the world may be discerned in the reading of his gait. Given that the
flaneur is the most characteristic modernist character, the gait—the rhythm
of the pedestrian’s walk—may be reckoned the most significant modernist
gesture. In film, Charlie Chaplain’s gait is unmissable; in fiction, the gait
is more difficult to capture. Balzac’s Theory of the Gait was succeeded by
Muybridge’s 1877–78 photo sequences of human and animal gait. The
related topic of human posture had already been taken up by Thomas
Huxley in Evidence as to Man’s Place in Nature (1863), when he described
the progression from gibbon to chimpanzee to a human being, as a mat-
ter of learning to stand straight upright. Darwin, too, focused on human
motion in The Descent of Man (1871). By the new century, the posture
of the stooped “weakling” was being decried by Baden-Powell. Given the
thoroughly anomalous position of the “wild Irish” in nineteenth-century
British racial discourse, the Irishman’s gait, it turned out, could work as
an ideally contested zone in the representation of modernist subjectivity.
At the same time, the two “gallants” here are representative of the
inglorious end of the dandy tradition, and dandies had always been
attacked for the affectation of their gait.
“Mark how he walks, as if on eggs,” Charles Varlo had written of “The
Fop” in 1793. In Lenehan’s “walk on eggs,” we can see three elements:
first, imitation, second, exhaustion, and third, excitement. First Lenehan
imitates Corley; he admires and would make a pattern of Corley’s version
of a masculine gait. This is Corley as seen through Lenehan’s eyes: “He
sauntered across the road swaying his head from side to side. His bulk,
his easy pace, and the solid sound of his boots had something of the con-
queror in them.”18 Soon, as Lenehan follows Corley and the slavey, we are
told that “as he walked on slowly, timing his pace to theirs, he watched
Corley’s head which turned at every moment towards the young wom-
an’s face like a big ball revolving on a pivot.”19 This homosocial gaze20
leaves Lenehan trying to find a rhythm for his own gestures in the version
of masculine gesturality practiced by his accomplice. With Corley out of
sight, he then attempts to imagine a national rhythm, and expresses it in
another gesture, now imitating the harpist he had seen earlier: “The air
which the harpist had played began to control his movements. His softly
padded feet played the melody while his fingers swept a scale of varia-
tions idly along the railings after each group of notes.”21 Here, Lenehan is
close to dance. After imitating the gestural rhythms of gendered and then
national gesture, we at last see him alone, eating his dish of peas: “His
face was heated. To appear natural he pushed his cap back on his head and
planted his elbows on the table.”22 This is the low point not only of his
flanerie, but of all his attempted gestures. After this, returning from where
he set out, he is only a gaze: “His eyes searched the street …. He strained
his eyes as each tram stopped.”23 He becomes like us, and like the film
viewers of a silent film: when Corley and the slavey do return, “He started
with delight and, keeping close to the lamp-post, tried to read the result
in their walk.” What he observes next seem like a few fast night-moves
in a noir drama: “His broad figure hid hers from view for a few seconds
and then she reappeared running up the steps … he ran eagerly across the
road.”24 Corley ignores him, builds suspense: “Then with a grave gesture
he extended a hand towards the light and, smiling, opened it slowly to the
gaze of his disciple. A small gold coin shone in the palm.”25 The story ends
in medias res. What did Lenehan do next? We can guess his delight, and
his reversion to his pre-gestural embodiment. Very probably: “Little jets
of wheezing laughter followed one another out of his convulsed body.”26
One intertext here is Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr.
Hyde (1886). There, too, there are two men in the night street, one stolid
and “respectable,” the other hunched up and convulsed. In Stevenson,
the convulsed man is the danger, but they turn out to be one and the
same. This returns us to the question of the Irish specificity of the gestur-
ing men in “Two Gallants.” To put it another way: what does attending to
the men’s gestures, rather than being beguiled by the enigma of the coin,
tell us about the story that is new? Clearly, the standard reading—that here
210 E. DUFFY
is an indictment of two not so young, modern men and their predatory

behavior—is indisputable. What a sense of the skewed grammar of their
gestural repertoires might grant us, nevertheless, is a greater sense of their
predicament. This brings us back to Agamben’s point that around 1900
the bourgeoisie had lost their gestures and our question of why this might
have occurred.
For western men, the historical moment in relation to movement was
an interesting one. For a large swathe of the male population, the older
reliance on physical labor was being replaced for the middle class of clerks,
teachers, and so on, by “white collar” affective labor. In this transition, the
male gesture was bound to take on new valences. It is at this moment that
flanerie—not the walk of the leisured haut-bourgeois of Baudelaire, but
the walk of the harried modernist clerk in “Prufrock” or a Kafka story—
came into its own. This flanerie mediated between the older male order of
physical labor and the new male order of service work. Again, in the Irish
context, these issues were even more pressing. Irish masculinity was valued
by the dominant British discourse of the day in terms of the “Irish navvy”
or laborer; the Irish bourgeoisie had yet to be fully realized. As young
Irishmen clamored to join that new class, there was not enough work for
them. This is where Corley and Lenehan find themselves: the slavey is the
one who does manual work here; they, clinging to a higher social status,
are unemployed.
“Two Gallants,” then, is a short story about unemployment. It explores
its pathologies, through a grammar of the gestures of two unemployed
not-quite-young men. What their unemployment means, gesture-wise, is
that they cannot naturally, confidently walk: that is, they cannot natu-
rally, confidently embody the kind of physical dexterity that a “laboring
man” would have achieved without thinking. (They are serious versions of
the comic Captain Boyle and Joxer in O’Casey’s Juno and the Paycock of
1924, likewise unemployed, creeping off to the pub.) Yet if their walk is
estranged—with Lenehan’s convulsions and Corley’s uncannily revolving
head—their smile, their laughter, is even more grotesquely curtailed and
distorted. The laboring work their class had forsaken might be signified by
the physical effort of the walk; the service work to which they aspire has as
its most characteristic gesture the smile.
If we examine the story, we discover that it lists a whole taxonomy of
laughs and smiles, almost every one of them strangely distorted, stilted,
strangled before it can be natural. The story opens with Lenehan’s “little
jets of wheezing laughter”; after Corley’s tale, we are told that “Lenehan
laughed again, noiselessly.” Soon we hear that “Corley occasionally turned

to smile at some of the passing girls,”27 and of Lenehan again that “A
shade of mockery relieved the servility of his manner.” Then on Corley,
the shade of another smile: “He moistened his upper lip by running his
tongue along it. The recollection brightened his eyes.”28 The slavey, alone,
laughs: “Once or twice when he spoke to her at close quarters she laughed
and bent her head”29; and “She had broad nostrils, a straggling mouth
which lay open in a contented leer.” Lenehan remembers “the leer of
the young woman’s mouth” and he is so exhausted doing nothing that
his own leer fades on what we are told is his “ravaged” face. Laughter,
grins, and leers all cease, until the moment when, in the dark, lit by the
streetlight, Corley’s hand extends toward the light—and he smiles. In this
sense, “Two Gallants” is a story about finally achieving the ability to smile.
Corley smiles because he has successfully acted like a service worker, which
is to say, like a salesman: he has persuaded another gullible customer, he
has made a sale. Does Joyce approve of this gruesome salesmanship, this
success of the service worker? Or is Corley’s final smile a further perverse
horror, a shade more grim, because more exploitative, than the slavey’s
open-mouthed leer? Corley’s is the salesman’s, service worker’s smile—
and Corley (like Bloom later) works on commission. These men will be
the small businessmen of the new Ireland, gesturing masculinity and ges-
turing Irishness, and failing to do so on both counts, but still summoning
up enough guile to play a service-worker game as exploitation, and to
show it with a smile.
Notes
1. The definitive textual record of this film is Cabiria, Visione storica del III
secolo a.C.,Giovanni Pastrone, Didascalie do Gabriele D’Annuzio, curated
by Roberto Radicati and Ruggero Rossi (Torino: Museo Nazionale del
Cinema, 1977).
2. Giorgio Agamben, “Notes on Gesture,” in Means Without Ends: Notes on
Politics, trans. Vincenzo Binetti and Cesare Casarino (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 2000), 49–62.
3. See Anson Rabinbach, The Human Motor: Energy, Fatigue, and the Origins
of Modernity (Berkeley, CA.: Univ. of California Press, 1992).
4. James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, ed. Seamus Deane
(London: Penguin, 1992).
5. Agamben, “Notes,” 51.
212 E. DUFFY
6. Quoted in Gerald Griffin, The Wild Geese: Pen Portraits of Famous Irish
Exiles (London: Jarrolds, 1938), 24.
7. This appears to be Terence Brown’s opinion, when he notes that she “then
entered the main part of the house where she steals the coin ….” See James
Joyce, Dubliners, with an Introduction and Notes by Terence Brown
(London: Penguin, 1992), Note 68, p. 226.
8. See Garry Leonard, Reading “Dubliners” Again: A Lacanian Perspective
(Syracuse, NY: Syracuse Univ. Press, 1993), 120: “Because a free bout of
all-night drinking depends upon it ….”
9. Marilyn Reizbaum and Maud Ellmann, “En Garde: ‘Two Gallants,’” in
Collaborative “Dubliners”: Joyce in Dialogue, ed. Vicki Mahaffey (Syracuse,
NY: Syracuse Univ. Press, 2012), 125–143.
10. The best “suspicious” reading of “Two Gallants,” fully cognizant of the
many ways the narrative entraps us, is “Gambling with Gambles in ‘Two
Gallants’” by Margot Norris in her Suspicious Readings of Joyce’s “Dubliners”
(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003), 80–92.
11. James Joyce, Dubliners, ed. Terence Brown (New York: Penguin, 1992).
12. For these, see L.P. Curtis, Apes and Angels: The Irishman in Victorian
Caricature (Newton Abbott: David and Charles, 1971) 1971, e.g.
Tenniel’s “Irish Frankenstein,” 43.
14. Curtis, Apes and Angels, 43.
15. See Melody Jue, “Vampire Squid Media,” Grey Room 57, Fall 2014, 82–105.
17. Ibid, 49.
18. Ibid, 49.
19. Ibid, 50.
20. See Joseph Valente, ed., Quare Joyce (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan
Press, 1998) and The Myth of Manliness in Irish Culture, 1880–1922
(Champaign-Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press, 2011).
22. Ibid, 51.
23. Ibid, 53.
24. Ibid, 54.
25. Ibid, 55.
26. Ibid, 43.
27. Ibid, 45.
28. Ibid, 46–47.
29. Ibid, 49.
Bibliography
Agamben, Giorgio. “Notes on Gesture.” Means Without Ends: Notes on Politics.
Translated by Vincenzo Binetti and Cesare Casarino. Minneapolis: University
of Minnesota Press, 2000: 49–62.
––––. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Translated by Daniel Heller-
Roazen. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998.
Balzac, Honoré de. “Théorie de la démarche.” Oeuvres diverses de Honoré de
Balzac, Vol. 2 (1830–35). Paris: Louis Conard, 1938: 613–43.
Begson, Henri. Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic. Translated by
Clouldsley Bereton and Fred Rothwell. Rockville, MD: Wildside Press, 2008.
Curtis, L. P. Apes and Angels: The Irishman in Victorian Caricature. Newton
Abbott: David and Charles, 1971.
Fanon, Frantz. The Wretched of the Earth. Translated by Richard Philcox. New
York: Grove Press, 2008.
Griffin, Gerald. The Wild Geese: Pen Portraits of Famous Irish Exiles. London:
Jarrolds, 1938.
Joyce, James. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Edited by Seamus Deane.
London: Penguin, 1992.
––––. Dubliners. Edited by Terence Brown. New York: Penguin, 1992.
Jue, Melody. “Vampire Squid Media.” Grey Room 57 (Fall 2014): 82–105.
Leonard, Garry. Reading “Dubliners” Again: A Lacanian Perspective. Syracuse,
Rabinbach, Anson. The Human Motor: Energy, Fatigue, and the Origins of
Modernity. Berkeley, CA.: Univ. of California Press, 1992.
Radicati, Roberto and Ruggero Rossi. Cabiria, Visione storica del III secolo
a.C.,Giovanni Pastrone, Didascalie do Gabriele D’Annuzio. Torino: Museo
Nazionale del Cinema, 1977.
Reizbaum, Marilyn and Maud Ellmann. “En Garde: ‘Two Gallants.’” Collaborative
“Dubliners”: Joyce in Dialogue, edited by Vicki Mahaffey, 125–143. Syracuse,
Somervillle, Edith and Martin Ross. Further Experiences of an Irish RM. London:
Longmans, Green & Co., 1908.
––––. Some Experiences of an Irish RM. London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1899.
Valente, Joseph, ed. Quare Joyce. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1998.
––––. The Myth of Manliness in Irish Culture, 1880–1922. Champaign-Urbana:
Varlo, Charles. Nature Display’d, A New Work by Different Gentlemen. London:
1773.
Index1
A beginnings in, 14, 15

Achebe, Chinua, 132 epiphany and intermental cognition
adultery, 34, 37–41, 45–46 in, 164, 169
“After the Race” (Joyce) and freedom, 55
beginnings in, 14, 16 gnomon in, 80–81
and Futurism, 198 going back in, 20
going back in, 20, 25 mapping of, 78
intermental cognition in, 167 optimism in, 16
mapping and geographical and paralysis, 10–11
references in, 78, 81–82 and social class, 125–26
masculinity in, 198–99 and wedge metaphor, 24
movement and gesture in, 195–96, Arcades Project (Benjamin), 124, 132
198–99
optimism in, 16
and paralysis, 20 B
and wedge metaphor, 24 Baden-Powell, Robert, 199, 208
Agamben, Giorgio, 196–97, 199, 200, Balzac, Honoré de, 138n51, 205, 208
202, 210 Barnacle, Nora, 130, 178, 181, 182
Althusser, Louis, 111n12 Baudelaire, Charles, 130, 132, 210
Anna Karenina (Tolstoy), Baudrillard, Jean, 131
37–42 Beau Geste (Wren), 199
anti-Semitism, 134. See also Judaism Beck, Warren, 60
“Araby” (Joyce) Beckett, Samuel, 16–17
Note: Page numbers followed by “n” denote end notes.

1

DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-39336-0
216 INDEX
beginnings, 12–18, 21–22 Joyce’s rejection of, 178–80, 188

Begnal, Michael, 118 in Joyce’s writing, 4–5, 41, 53,
Being and Nothingness (Sartre), 53–54 83–84, 167, 181–82, 187–88
Beja, Morris, 161 liturgical language and epiphany, 171
Benjamin, Walter and sexual repression, 98
influence of, 23, 118–20, 124, 131 Celtic Revival, 17, 26, 40, 102
on sexuality, 132 Chamón, Segundo de, 195
and social class, 119–20, 132 Chaplin, Charlie, 208
Benstock, Bernard, 145, 153 Charlton, Ellen, 129, 131
Bergson, Henri, 203, 205 Chaudhry-Fryer, Mamta, 154, 156
Bishop, John, 110 Chekhov, Anton, 198
Blamires, Harry, 138n52 Cheng, Vincent J., 97, 101
“The Boarding House” (Joyce) Chicago, 125
beginnings in, 14, 16 Chicago School of urban sociology,
directional theme in, 185 117, 121, 124, 125
geographical references in, 83–84, 89 Cities and Cinema (Mennel), 123–24
going back in, 25 The City (Burgess, Park and
intermental cognition in, 168 McKenzie), 124
and religion, 83–84 City in Literature (Lehan), 118
and wedge metaphor, 24 Clancy, John, 116
The Bohemian Girl (Balfe), 89 “Clay” (Joyce), 14, 20, 24, 156,
Bowen, Elizabeth, 97 167, 186
Bowen, Zack, 89 cliffnotes.com, 12
Brandabur, Edward, 63–64 Collaborative Dubliners
Brazeau, Robert, 121, 136n26 “Introduction” (Mahaffey and
Brick, Martin, 161–72 Shashaty), 100, 180
Briggs, Austin, 131 Collis, Margot, 30n75
British Empire, 187–88, 200 communism and socialism, 47,
Brown, Terence, 10 120–21, 133–34
Bulson, Eric, 77 Companion to the British and Irish
Burgess, Anthony, 3, 22 Short Story (Malcolm and
Burgess, Ernest, 116–17, 124, 125 Malcolm), 176
Congress of Soviet Writers, 120–21
Connolly, James, 133
C Conrad, Joseph, 127, 132
Cabiria (1914), 195–96 “Counterparts” (Joyce)
Callanan Frank, 17 beginnings in, 14, 16
Cambridge Companion to James Joyce electrate retelling of, 145, 146,
(Leonard), 23–24 148–49, 157
Canon, Walter, 196 epiphany and intermental cognition
The Castle (Kafka), 208 in, 169–70
Catholicism and Catholic Church and freedom, 61–64
INDEX 217
gender and gender roles in, and paralysis, 10–11, 19–20

97–98, 146 sexuality in, 101–2
geographical references in, 85, 89 and wedge metaphor, 24
and literate culture, 145–48, death, 42–45, 47
150–57 Delaney, Frank, 124
masculinity in, 152, 155 Delany, Paul, 152
and oral culture, 145–47, 150–57 Deleuze, Gilles, 204
and paralysis, 10–11 Derrida, Jacques, 91
and print culture, 149–57 Descent of Man (Darwin), 208
Creative Evolution (Bergson), 203 Devlin, Kimberly J., 99
Croft, Jo, 97 domestic interior
Culleton, Claire A., 1–6, 9–31 in “The Dead” (Joyce), 96, 101,
Cusick, Christine, 18, 19, 25, 119–21 102, 105
and nation formation, 96–100, 106
Donoghue, Denis, 146, 151
D Donoghue, Emma, 105–10
Mrs. Dalloway (Woolf), 208 “Drama and Life” (Joyce), 17, 181
dandy tradition, 208. See also Dreiser, Theodore, 135n15
movement and gesture Dublin Diary (Stanislaus Joyce), 130
Dante Alighieri, 182, 186–87 Dublin’s Joyce (Kenner), 33
D’Arcy, W. P. D., 188 Dublin Metropolitan Police (DMP), 22
Darwin, Charles, 203, 208 Dublin Slums, 1800–1925 (Prunty),
“The Dead” (Joyce) 137n43
beginnings in, 15 Dudley, Jack, 175–92
death in, 45 Duffy, Enda, 3, 107–8, 118–20,
directional theme in, 185 195–212
and domestic interior, 96, 101, Dumas, Alexandre, 138n51
102, 105 Durkheim, Emile, 118
ejaculation in, 96 Duse, Eleonora, 199
gender in, 96–98
going back in, 25
hospitality in, 189 E
intermental cognition in, 165–67 Eagleton, Terry, 16–17
mapping and geographical Easter Rising, 3–6, 22, 76. See also
references in, 40, 78, 82, 87–88 revolution
masculinity in, 101 Eco-Joyce (Brazeau and Gladwin),
mirroring in, 98–110 25, 121
money in, 103–4 Eide, Marian, 163
movement in, 95–96 ejaculation, 96, 99, 106–7. See also
musical references in, 104 masculinity
nationhood in, 99, 102–3, 105 electrate culture, 145, 146,
optimism in, 16 148–49, 157
218 INDEX
Eliot, T. S., 70, 178, 187, 198, F

208, 210 Fairhall, James, 5, 121, 133
Ellmann, Maud, 201–3 Famine (Ireland, 1840s), 4–5, 10,
Ellmann, Richard, 17, 47, 49n14, 99–100, 168
178, 179, 188–89 Fanon, Frantz, 207
“An Encounter” (Joyce) Felski, Rita, 97
beginnings in, 16 female other
and colonial dynamic, 115 Joyce’s use of, 99–110, 111n12,
directional theme in, 185 156–57
and ecocriticism, 115–16 and nationhood, 97–98, 100
and freedom, 55 Fenianism, 17
gnomon in, 79–80 feuilleton, 119–20
going back in, 20, 25 “The Fifth Migration” (Fishman),
intermental cognition in, 163 135n13
mapping and geographical film, 201
references in, 73–74, 90 Finnegans Wake (Joyce), 99, 110, 146
optimism in, 15–16 Fishman, Robert, 135n13
and social class, 120, 125, 126 flaneur, 198, 208
“En Garde: ‘Two Gallants’” Flusser, Wilhelm, 204
(Reizbaum and Ellmann), Flynn, Catherine, 128
201–2 Fogarty, Anne, 23
environment, 25, 136n26 “The Fop” (Varlo), 208
Epic Geography (Seidel), 33, 80 Foster, R. F., 4
epiphany, 161–71, 184, 190n30 Foucault, Michel, 118
Epiphany in the Modern Novel Four Plays for Dancers (Yeats), 200
(Beja), 161 Frawley, Oona, 19, 23
Estok, Simon, 136n26 freedom
“Eveline” (Joyce) in The Boarding House (Joyce), 83
beginnings in, 14, 16 existential freedom, 53–65
and freedom, 55–56 in “Grace” (Joyce), 184
geographical references in, 81 in “A Little Cloud” (Joyce), 165
gnomon in, 79 and paralysis, 3, 51–53, 197
going back in, 25 in “The Sisters” (Joyce), 24
optimism in, 15 Freud, Sigmund, 205
and paralysis, 10–11, 13 Friel, Brian, 105–10
and wedge metaphor, 18–19, 24 Fuller, Loie, 199
Evidence as to Man’s Place in Nature Further Experiences of an Irish R.M.
(Huxley), 208 (Somerville and Ross), 200
Exiles (Joyce), 181 Futurism, 197–99
existential freedom, 53–65. See also
freedom
Expressionist theater, 128 G
Expression of Emotions in Man and gait, 208. See also movement and gesture
Animals (Darwin), 203 Galsworthy, John, 206
INDEX 219
The Gay Science (Nietzsche), 40 gonorrhea, 131

Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft Good Samaritan parable, 186, 188–89
(Tönnies), 118 Google maps, 74–77
gender and gender roles Gordon, John, 59
in “Counterparts” (Joyce), 146, Götterdämmerung (Wagner), 182
154–57 Gottfried, Roy, 178
in “The Dead” (Joyce), 96–98 “Grace” (Joyce)
and gesture, 199–200, 210 beginnings in, 15
Joyce’s use of female other, 99–110, directional theme in, 185
111n12, 156–57 geographical references in, 87,
and modernity, 100 89–90
and nation, 97–98, 100, 102, going back in, 20
107–8 intermental cognition in, 167, 170
in “A Painful Case” (Joyce), 45 oppression of Catholic Church in,
Gender of Modernity (Felski), 97 187–88
General Post Office, 76 and religion, 167, 177
geographical information systems and spirituality, 180, 183–89
(GIS), 124 and wedge metaphor, 24
“Geography, Scale, and Narrating the Great Britain Street, 76
Nation” (Howes), 25 Greaves, Richard, 176
gesture. See movement and gesture Groden, Michael, 21
Ghiselin, Brewster, 52–53 Guattari, Félix, 204
Gibbons, Luke Gutman, Robert, 137n31
on “The Dead” (Joyce), 101
on Joyce and Irish history, 17–18,
22, 23, 25–26 H
on paralysis concept, 19 Hagopian, John V., 61
on post-Famine Ireland, 168 Harding, Desmond, 70, 119
Gibson, Andrew Harding, Michael, 135n16, 136n21
on Dublin, 70–71 Harley, J. B., 71, 72
on history and politics in Joyce’s harp metaphor, 202, 206–7. See also
writing, 4, 98 musical references
on Joyce’s politics, 133–34 Hart, Clive, 69
on Joyce’s secularism, 179 Hauptmann, Gerhart, 35, 40
on paralysis concept, 22 Hayles, N. Katherine, 149
on psychology of Dubliners, Head, Dominic, 176
10, 163 Heaney, Seamus, 30n75
Gilbert, Stuart, 138n52 Heart of Darkness (Conrad), 127,
Gladwin, Derek, 121, 136n26 132
gnomon, 1–2, 11, 21–22, 26 Help My Unbelief (Lernout), 179
“Gnomon Inverted” (Senn), 1 Hendry, Irene, 161
Gnossiennes (Satie), 199 Henke, Suzette, 99
Gogarty, Oliver St. John, 131 Herman, David, 168
220 INDEX
Homo Sacer (Agamben), 196 on Dubliners, 13, 52, 70, 71, 176
homosexuality, 40–41, 45–47. See also and ejaculation, 96
sexuality and nationalism and national
Howes, Marjorie, 25, 101 liberation, 5, 16, 97, 98, 115
human ecology, 122 and postal service, 101
Hunter, Alfred H., 188 on post-Famine Ireland, 10
Huxley, Thomas, 208 and racism and anti-Semitism, 132,
134
and religion, 178–82, 188
I and revolution, 3–5, 17–18, 23–24
Ibsen, Henrik, 181 and Samaritan encounter in, 188–89
Ignatius of Loyola’s spiritual and social class, 70, 71, 120–21
exercises, 182 and socialism, 133–34
Il Piccolo della Sera (Trieste), 17 and spirituality, 180–82
Inferno (Dante Alighieri), 186 on Wilde, Oscar, 47
Ingersoll, Earl, 60, 126, 138n47, 184 Joyce, James, works by. See also Joyce
Institute for Social Research criticism and scholarship
(Frankfurt), 117 political influence of, 5–6, 17–18,
intermental cognition, 162–71 23, 25–26
Internet interpretations of James structure of, 79, 88, 100, 184, 185,
Joyce, 12 187
“Ireland, Island of Saints and Sages” teaching of, 2, 9, 11–12
(Joyce), 22 Joyce, Lucia, 199
Irish Homestead, 18 Joyce, Stanislaus, 49n33, 130, 179, 183
“Irish Short Fiction” (Lonergan), 176 Joyce, Chaos, and Complexity (Rice),
Irish Socialist Party, 37, 47 27n19, 28n19
Iseult legend, 34 Joyce criticism and scholarship, 1–2, 9,
“Ivy Day in the Committee Room” 11–12, 70
(Joyce), 4, 9–10, 14, 16, 87, 134 Joyce in America (Segall), 136n25
Joyce’s Book of the Dark (Bishop), 110
Joyce’s City (Morgan), 10
J Joyce’s Ghosts (Gibbons), 17
Jackson, John Wyse, 84, 135n10 “Joyce’s ‘Naussica’: The Paradox of
James Joyce, and the Question of History Advertising Narcissim” (Ochoa),
(Fairhill), 133 111n12
James Joyce’s Odyssey (Delaney), 124 Joyce’s Politics (Manganiello), 133
James Joyce, Urban Planning and Irish Judaism, 84, 108, 134, 188
Modernism (Lanigan), 124–25 Juno and the Paycock (O’Casey), 210
John Gabriel Borkman (Ibsen), 181
Jordan, Neil, 105–10
Joyce, Charles, 28n44, 29n44 K
Joyce, Giorgio, 182 Kafka, Franz, 208, 210
Joyce, James Kelly, Joseph P., 70, 115–40
on Celtic Revival, 4 Kenner, Hugh, 22, 33, 79, 95, 201
INDEX 221
Kershner, Brandon, 136n26 Lowe-Evans, Mary, 178

Keystone Kops, 20 Luddy, Maria, 131
Kid Auto Races in Venice (1914), 208
Kim, Sharon, 178, 181
Kittler, Friedrich, 148, 155 M
Krafft-Ebing, Richard von, 138n52 Mabel’s Strange Predicament
(1914), 208
Madame Bovary (Flaubert), 37–41
L Magalaner, Marvin, 184
Lacan, Jacques, 100, 111n12 Magdalene asylums, 131
Lanigan, Liam, 119, 124–25, 132, The Magdalene Sisters (2003), 98
133, 136n21 Mahaffey, Vicki, 21, 100, 180
The Last September (1999), 98 Mahaffy, J. Pentland, 200
Laughter (Bergson), 205 Majumdar, Saikat, 10–11
Lawrence, Karen R., 21 Mallet, Robert, 77
LeBlanc, Jim, 3, 51–67 “Man and the Echo” (Yeats), 22
Lehan, Richard, 118 Manganiello, Dominic, 133
Leonard, Garry, 23–24, 63, 131 Manifesto of Futurism (Marinetti), 198
Lernout, Geert, 179 mapping and geographical references,
Levin, Harry, 128, 161 33–40, 69–91, 123, 124
Lewis, Pericles, 177–78 Mapping “Dubliners” Project, 71–91
Light Rays: James Joyce and Modernism Marey, Jules, 196
(Beja and Ehrlich), 179 Marinetti, Filippo, 197–98
Literary Epiphany in the Novel masculinity
(Kim), 178 and colonization, 199, 207
literate culture, 145–48, 150–57 ejaculation, 96, 99, 106–7
“A Little Cloud” (Joyce) in Joyce’s writing, 101
beginnings in, 14, 16 and nationalism, 3, 98–99
epiphany and intermental cognition Massachusetts Board of Health, 122
in, 164–65, 169 Matter and Memory (Bergson), 203
and freedom, 57–61, 165 Maynooth catechism, 35
going back in, 25 McCabe, Patrick, 105–10
mapping and geographical McCormack, John, 83
references in, 78, 84–85, 89 McGinley, Bernard, 84, 135n10
optimism in, 16 McGreevy, Ronan, 22
and social class, 120 McKenzie, Roderick, 117, 122–25
and wedge metaphor, 24 McKeon, Belinda, 145, 148–49, 157
Lloyd, David, 145, 146, 152, 154, Men at Arms (Waugh), 172n28
155 Mennel, Barbara, 123–24
London, 74, 75, 89–90 Metropolis and Experience (Yoon),
Lonergan, Patrick, 176 136n21
“The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” “Metropolis and Mental Life”
(Eliot), 198, 208, 210 (Simmel), 118
222 INDEX
“Metropolis and the Emergence of Musger, August, 197

Modernism” (Williams), 125, musical references
138n45 in “The Boarding House” (Joyce),
Michael Kramer (Hauptmann), 35 83, 89
Miller, Harvey J., 137n38 in “The Dead” (Joyce), 104
mirroring, 98–110 in “A Mother” (Joyce), 14–15,
modernism 89, 170
and gesture and gait, 196–98, 205, in “A Painful Case” (Joyce),
208 35–38, 40
and Joyce’s Writing, 2, 4–6, 120 in “Two Gallants” (Joyce), 202,
and religion, 177–78 206–7
and social class, 138n45, 210 Muybridge, Eadweard, 196, 208
modernity My Brother’s Keeper (Stanislaus
and gender, 97–98, 100 Joyce), 187
and hybrid nation, 98, 99
and Irish Famine, 4–5
and paralysis, 10–11 N
money, 103–4 nationalism and nation
Moore, Patrick, 129 and domestic interior, 96–100, 106
Moore, Thomas, 200 and gender and gender roles, 3,
Moretti, Franco, 88 97–98, 100, 102, 107–8
Morgan, Jack, 10, 15, 17, 19, 22 Joyce and, 5, 16, 22
Mosso, Angelo, 196 in Joyce’s writing, 53, 98, 99,
“A Mother” (Joyce), 14–15, 20, 24, 102–3, 105, 115, 206–7
87, 89, 170, 186 and modernity, 4–5, 99
movement and gesture and movement and gesture, 6, 200
activity and pause, 13 National Library of Ireland, 88
gait, 208 Neighborhood, City, and Metropolis
and gender and gender roles, (Gutman and Popenoe), 137n31
199–211 New Critics, 120–21
going back, 20, 25 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 40
and nation, 6, 200 Norris, Margot, 3, 33–50, 131, 133,
and paralysis, 3, 11–12, 20, 136n26, 163, 184, 186
95–96, 197 Norton Anthology of English Literature
and progress, 3–4 (Greenblatt), 176
and social class, 195–97, 201–11 Novels, Maps, Modernity (Bulson), 77
and speed, 198–99
stylization of, 195–96
and wedge metaphor, 25 O
Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus, 35, 40 O’Brien, Joseph V., 131
Mulliken, Jasmine, 69–93 O’Casey, Sean, 210
Mumford, Lewis, 135n16 Ochoa, Peggy, 111n12
Munch, Edvard, 201, 203 O’Connell, Daniel, 76
INDEX 223
O’Connell Street, 76 paralysis

O’Connor, Ulick, 131 and beginnings, 15
Odyssey (Homer), 80 examples of in Dubliners, 10, 13,
O’Kane Mara, Miriam, 145–59 51–52, 54, 95–96, 175
“‘Old Haunts’: Joyce, The Republic, and freedom, 3, 51–54,
and Photographic Memory” 64–65, 197
(Gibbons), 25–26 in Ireland, 6, 10–11
O’Lehane, Michael, 134 and Joyce scholarship and
Ong, Walter J., 146, 147, 150–52 criticism, 22
“On the Beach at Fontana” (Joyce), and modernity, 10–11
182 and movement and gesture, 11–12,
“On W. B. Yeats’s ‘The Man and the 20, 95–96, 197
Echo’” (Heaney), 30n75 and optimism, 15
optimism, 15–16 and paresis, 11
oral culture, 145–47, 150–57 reconsideration of for understanding
Ordinance Survey Ireland website, Dubliners, 2–3, 9–27, 176
138n50 and spiritual liberation, 176
Our House: The Representation of and wedge metaphor, 17
Domestic Space in Modern Park, Robert, 116–17, 123–25, 128
Culture, 97 Parnell, Charles Stewart, 76
“Our Joyce (Kelly), 140n77 Parnell affair, 46
Owens, Cóilín, 85 Partisan Review, 120–21
Owens, Kate, 130 Pastrone, Giovanni, 195–96
Pater, Walter, 202
Peake, C. H., 184
P Pearse, Patrick, 17
“A Painful Case” (Joyce) personal dyads, 163
absence and negativity in, 34–48 political ecology, 124
adultery in, 34, 37–41, 45–46 Popenoe, David, 137n31
beginnings in, 14 A Portrait of the Artist as a Young
death in, 42–45 Man (Joyce)
gender roles in, 45 and colonialism, 106–10
geographical references in, 33–35, directional theme in, 185
38–40, 86–87 and ecocriticism, 125
homosexuality in, 40–41, 45–47 ejaculation in, 99, 105–10
intermental cognition in, 167 gesture in, 196, 197
and religion, 41 mirroring in, 99
and revolution, 37, 47 movement and gesture in, 196–97
social convention in, 3 and spirituality and religion, 23,
and spirituality, 186 53, 182
and wedge metaphor, 21, 24 positioning theory, 168
Palmer, Alan, 162, 163, 169 Pound, Ezra, 25, 70
“A Paralysed City” (Burgess), 3 Power, Chris, 148
224 INDEX
“Present Problem of Social Structure” Sackville Street, 76

(Tönnies), 118 Saint-Amour, Paul K., 21
print culture, 149–57 St. George’s Church, 76–77
projected dyad, 163 Salzani, Carlo, 23
Prose of the World: Modernism and the Sartre, Jean-Paul
Banality of Empire (Majumdar), on choice, 53–55, 60, 62
10–11 on freedom, 53–57, 59, 64
prostitution, 128–34, 183 Satie, Erik, 199
Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Scheible, Ellen, 1–6, 95–113
Capitalism (Weber), 118 Scholes, Robert, 161
Provincials (Joyce), 135n19 Scouting for Boys (Baden-Powell), 199
Prunty, Jacinta, 137n43 The Scream (Munch), 201, 203
“Psychic Geography of Joyce’s “The Second Coming” (Yeats), 102
Dubliners” (Ingersoll), 126, secularism, 178–80
138n47 Segall, Jeffrey, 136n25
Psychopathia Sexualis (Krafft-Ebing), Seidel, Michael, 33, 80
138n52 Semicolonial Joyce (Attridge and
Public Works (Rubenstein), 124 Howes), 168
Senn, Fritz, 1–2, 107
“September 1913” (Yeats), 26, 207
R sexuality
racism, 200 Benjamin, Walter on, 128, 132
Rahv, Philip, 120–21 Catholic Church and, 41, 98
Reizbaum, Marilyn, 201–3 homosexuality, 40–41, 45–47
ReJoycing: New Readings of “Dubliners” in Joyce’s writing, 40–41, 45–47,
(Bosinelli and Mosher), 1 101–2, 131–34, 206–7
“Representation and Spatial Analysis in and social class, 127–34
Geographic Information Systems” “Shakespeare and Ecocriticism”
(Miller and Wentz), 137n38 (Estok), 136n26
revolution, 3–5, 22, 37, 47 Shashaty, Jill, 100, 180
Rice, Thomas Jackson, 27n19, 28n19 Shechner, Mark, 138n52
Richard, John, 23 “Shocking the Reader in
Richards, Ellen Swallow, 121–22 ‘A Painful Case’” (Norris), 49n26
Richards, Grant, 23, 52 Short, Rennie, 123
Robbins, Paul, 124 Simmel, Georg, 118–20, 131, 132
Ross, Martin, 200 simony, 177, 183
Rubenstein, Michael, 124 Simpson, John, 129
Rutland Square (Parnell Square), 76 Sinico, Guiseppe, 49n14
Sinn Fein, 133
“The Sisters” (Joyce)
S beginnings in, 12–14, 16
Sacks, Oliver, 197 and freedom, 24, 51–52, 54, 65
Sackville, Lionel, 76 gnomon in, 11, 79
INDEX 225
going back in, 25 The Subaltern “Ulysses” (Duffy),

intermental cognition in, 167 107–8, 118–19
mapping and geographical Sunset Boulevard (1950), 20
references in, 73, 90 Suspicious Readings of Dubliners
and paralysis, 10, 11, 51–52, (Norris), 184
54, 175 syphilis, 131
and religion, 183
and spirituality, 186
and wedge metaphor, 24 T
situational dyads, 163 Teal, Laurie, 130, 133
Smyth, Gerry, 97 Theory of the Gait (Balzac), 205, 208
social class thin end of the wedge, 10. See also
and gesture, 210 wedge metaphor
James Joyce and, 116, 133–34 Thus Spake Zarathustra
and Joyce’s writing, 70, 71, 116, (Nietzsche), 40
120–21, 125–34 Tönnies, Ferdinand, 118
and modernism, 138n45, 210 Torchiana, Donald, 22
and Walter Benjamin, 119–20, 132 Tourette, Gilles de la, 196
socialism and communism, 37, 47, Tourette’s syndrome, 197
120–21, 133–34 Twitter, 148–49
social media, 148–49 “Two Gallants” (Joyce)
Some Experiences of an Irish R.M. beginnings in, 14, 16
(Somerville and Ross), 200 and Futurism, 198–99
Somerville, Edith, 200 gnomon in, 82–83
Sonda, Giovanna, 123 going back in, 25
soul masculinity in, 3, 198–99,
in “The Dead” (Joyce), 19 201–11
Joyce’s concept of, 180, 181 movement and gesture in, 3,
in “A Painful Case” (Joyce), 36, 39, 195–96, 198–99, 201–11
40, 42 and nationalism, 3, 206–7
in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young and sexuality, 206–7
Man (Joyce), 99, 106–7, 109 and spirituality, 186
sparknotes.com, 12 and wedge metaphor, 24
spirituality, 176–78, 180–89 typewriter, 146, 148–51,
Stein, Gertrude, 34 155–57
Stephen Hero (Joyce), 161, 176,
181–82
Stevenson, Robert Louis, 209 U
Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde Ulmer, Gregory, 146
(Stevenson), 209 Ulysses (Joyce)
Strong Spirit; History, Politics and Catholic Church in, 187–88
Aesthetics in the Writings of James and colonialism, 106–10
Joyce 1898–1915 (Gibson), 10, and ecocriticism, 121
30n76, 133–34, 179 ejaculation in, 99, 106–7
226 INDEX
Ulysses (Joyce) (cont.) W

epiphany in, 184 Waiting for Godot (Beckett), 16–17
gender roles in, 98, 205 “Walking Ulysses” mapping project, 77.
mapping and geographical See also mapping and geographical
references in, 33, 69, 80, 208 references
mirroring in, 99, 105–10 Walzl, Florence, 161
movement and gesture in, The Waste Land (Eliot), 187
196–97, 205 Waugh, Evelyn, 172n28
and nationalism, 102 Weber, Max, 118, 119
orality of, 146 wedge metaphor, 9–10, 17–19,
and paralysis, 10–11 21–22, 24–26
Samaritan encounter in, 177, 188–89 Weir, David, 79
sexuality in, 99, 128–34 Wentz, Elizabeth A., 137n38
and social class, 128–34 Wertsch, James, 162
and spirituality, 186 Whelan, Kevin, 23, 98
Uncle Charles Principle (Kenner), Wilde, Oscar, 40, 47, 199
79, 201 Williams, Raymond, 125, 138n45
United Irishman, 17, 70, 133, 163 Winston, Greg, 115, 124
urban ecocriticism, 121–25 Woolf, Virginia, 208
urban ecology, 121–22 Wordsworth, William, 35
urban literary criticism, 117–21 Wren, P. C., 199
urban planning, 124–25 Wretched of the Earth (Fanon), 207
Urban Plots, Organizing Cities
(Sonda), 123
urban sociology, 117, 121, 124, 125 Y
Urban Theory (Short), 123 Yeats, William Butler, 5–6, 22, 26, 97,
102, 200, 207
Yoon, Hye-Joon, 136n21
V
Valente, Joseph, 98
Varlo, Charles, 208 Z
Vaughan, Bernard, 183 Zola, Émile, 123

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NEW DIRECTIONS IN IRISH AND IRISH AMERICAN LITERATURE

More information about this series at

New Directions in Irish and Irish American Literature

Library of Congress Control Number: 2016955845

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2017

Cover image © gareth mcguckin / Alamy Stock Photo

Printed on acid-free paper

This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by Springer Nature

1 Introduction. Rethinking Dubliners:

2 “The Thin End of the Wedge”:

3 “No There There”: Place, Absence, and Negativity

4 A “Sensation of Freedom” and the Rejection

5 “Scudding in Towards Dublin”: Joyce Studies

6 Joyce’s Mirror Stages and “The Dead” 95

7 Joyce’s Blinders: An Urban Ecocritical Study

8 Clashing Cultures in “Counterparts”: Navigating

9 Intermental Epiphanies: Rethinking Dubliners

10 From “Spiritual Paralysis” to “Spiritual Liberation”:

11 Men in Slow Motion: Male Gesture in “Two Gallants” 195

Fig. 5.1 Screenshot of the Mapping Dubliners Project homepage 72

© The Author(s) 2017 1

is nothing more than a descriptive possibility to see Dubliners on ­occasion

Culleton has previously written on Dubliners and returns to the text

The Irish Question: One Approach

useless moment in history and, yet, that he saw Dubliners as a necessary

developed as powerful cultural institutions and both sought to rebuild the

1916 Easter Rising that Yeats so dramatically memorializes in his famous

“The Thin End of the Wedge”: How Things

© The Author(s) 2017 9

predictable alcoholism.1 It is a relatively obscure expression in the United

If we focus on the beginnings of each story, how things start, we might

of her daughter Kathleen’s musical triumph in Dublin, but it is actually

It is difficult to trust this boy’s optimism because it seems the product

an atmosphere that is always what it is becoming. This is how Dubliners

He adds, “The Joyce of 1898–1903 is caught up in the new mood of

I am not trying to appropriate Joyce’s work in order to put it into a

Each story turns, in other words, on those beginning influences, and

Gibbons continues, suggesting that “Joyce offered cold comfort, it is true,

“No There There”: Place, Absence,

© The Author(s) 2017 33

a setting he chooses very deliberately, because “he wished to be as far as

as virtually without color, sporting a black bedstead, white sheets, a

not been generalized, however. There is no indication that he has become

voice, which he recognised as his own, insisting on the soul’s incurable

acknowledge, but the way he poses the problem continues to remind us

by the complex handling of the scenario of space as a site of mobility, the

34. Joyce, Dubliners, 96.

A “Sensation of Freedom” and the Rejection

There is an interesting moment in “The Sisters.” On the morning after

© The Author(s) 2017 51

in his ears—“strange” like the unmournful “sensation of freedom” he

Dedalus famously declares he intends to fly at the end of A Portrait of the

The stories that follow “The Sisters” in Joyce’s collection depict an

her dreary circumstances in Dublin: “She stood up in a sudden impulse of

in any given situation—contingencies that we cannot change, but which

First of all, there is drink, an attempt at liberation to which Farrington

“brief and ineffectual rebelliousness which only serves to ensure … a more

existential freedom in “The Sisters,” his discovery in himself of that “sen-

25. Sartre, L’Etre et le néant, 551.

61. Joyce, Dubliners, 92.

“Scudding in Towards Dublin”: Joyce

If it is true that, as Clive Hart argues, Ulysses “cannot be adequately

© The Author(s) 2017 69

is nothing more than a descriptive possibility to see Dubliners on occasion

paper identified as a “spiritless[ness of the] middle classes.”7 But just as

Portrait, for instance, Lanigan is not interested in the alienating s ensations

James Joyce’s “Counterparts” narrates a Dublin man, Farrington, losing

attention from purely oral communication to describe literate technologies,